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THE FRESHMAN 
AND HIS COLLEGE 



A COLLEGE MANUAL 



BY 

FRANCIS CUMMINS LOCKWOOD 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 
ALLEGHENY COLLEGE 



D. C HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 









COPYRIGHT, 1913, 
BY D. C. HEATH & CO. 

1H3 






3^ 



THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED TO 

MY STUDENTS 

WHEREVER DISPERSED 

IN THANKFUL APPRECIATION OF THE 

MANY HAPPY HOURS SPENT WITH 

THEM IN THE CLASS-ROOM 



PREFACE 

This book was prepared by one who, not many years ago, 
was a good-for-nothing Freshman. I much lament now, 
the time and opportunity which I ignorantly and idly wasted 
that first year in college. I do not think, though, that I was 
altogether to blame, for at that time I had a very vague 
conception of the real meaning of a college course. I think 
that I now know how it was that I made so many mistakes 
the first year. It is in the light of these useful experiences 
of my own that I am now prompted to make a modest 
attempt to aid a new generation of Freshmen during their 
first months in college. For a long time, in common with 
many other college instructors, I have been much grieved 
over the needless waste of Freshman life. In many of our 
larger institutions a considerable percentage of the Freshman 
class has been sent home during the year; and in every 
Freshman class there are a good many students who stum- 
ble and blunder painfully through the year, and if saved are 
saved only as by fire. I cannot but think that, as instruc- 
tors and older college men, we owe it to Freshmen, in some 
measure at least, to show them the way to the things that 
are worth while, and to set the signal lights for them along 
a somewhat perilous route. And surely it must somehow 
be possible for a boy to learn without enrolling in the school 
of hard knocks. It seems to me that there is almost no 
type of wisdom so high as that which, by anticipation, can 
learn from the faults and follies, from the virtues and suc- 
cesses of others how to choose the right course of action and 
how to avoid the wrong one. At any rate, it is with the 



vi Preface 

friendliest desire for the welfare of the Freshman and with 
the most confident belief that in the breast of the typical 
college youth good qualities ever predominate, that I offer 
my help through this book. 

My own contribution to the book is small, for I have pre- 
ferred to select my material mostly from the writings and 
the utterances of men of secure distinction. I am under 
obligation to these men for their generous consent to reprint 
what they have said or written. I therefore here record my 
grateful acknowledgment to President David Starr Jordan, 
to President William DeWitt Hyde, to President Charles 
William Eliot, to President Alexander Meiklejohn, and to 
President John Grier Hibben for the use of articles reprinted 
under their names. I desire, also, to express my special 
obligation to the various publishers who have so kindly per- 
mitted me to use material which bears their copyright, and 
to Mrs. Phoebe E. Johnson and Mrs. Harriet W. Thoburn 
for permission to reprint the addresses of their deceased hus- 
bands. I wish that I might also make due acknowledgment 
to the many wTiters whose articles or books I have read but 
whose names I have not been able to mention. In recogni- 
tion of their aid, and as a partial guide to the student who 
may desire to read more on college subjects, I have included 
a list of a score or more of the most useful books and arti- 
cles that have come under my eye. And finally, I must not 
fail to express my thanks to my esteemed colleagues. Pro- 
fessors W. A. Elliott and S. S. Swartley, and to Professor 
Lincoln R. Gibbs, for their valuable suggestions and their 

painstaking reading of my manuscript. 

F. C. L. 
Meadville, Pennsylvania, 
June 20, 19 13. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction i 

i. College Life Merely an Opportunity .... i 

ii. The American College Under Fire 3 

iii. What a College Education Really Means . . 5 

iv. Freshman Difficulties and Dangers 11 

V. Devotion to Boyhood Ideals 13 

vi. The Good Drudge Habit 15 

vii. Choice of Studies and Choice of a Life- Work 18 

The After-Self David Starr Jordan ... 23 

An Address to Freshmen . . William DeWitt Hyde . . 25 

Habit William James 33 

How TO Study Francis Cummins Lockwood 43 

Recent Tendencies in College 

Education David Starr Jordan ... 60 

The New Definition of the Cul- 
tivated Man Charles William Eliot , . 79 

Two Kinds of Education for 

Engineers John Butler Johnson ... 94 

A Poisonous Phrase William DeWitt Hyde . . iii 

An Inaugural Address .... Alexander Meiklejohn . . 113 

The Philosophy of Education . John Grier Hihhen ... 128 

New Wine in Old Bottles . . Wilbur W. Thoburn ... 143 

The Description of a Gentleman John Henry Newman . . 151 

Bibliography 155 



THE 
FRESHMAN AND HIS COLLEGE 

INTRODUCTION 

For eager teachers seized my youth, 
Pruned my faith and trimmed my fire, 

Showed me the high, white star of truth, 
There bade me gaze and there aspire. 

Matthew Arnold 

I 

College Life Merely an Opportunity 

At the cross-roads of life Hercules met the seductive 
form of Folly; but he chose to walk with Virtue, who at 
the same time invited him into her paths. The Freshman, 
also, stands at the parting of the ways. He will not have 
been in college a week before he will have to make choices 
that shall largely determine all his goings and comings for 
the future. ^^ Success consists in being ready for your 
opportunity.'' To be permitted to go to college is a priv- 
ilege that few may claim — a privilege too high to measure. 
Yet the guarantees of college life are far less certain than 
most Freshmen suppose. Entrance upon college life is, after 
all, only an opportunity. The course will be strew^n with 
wrecks all the way along the Freshman year. Many will 
be sent home because of idleness or dissipation. Some will 
be endured, but will be so hobbled and handicapped by 
conditions and penalties that they might almost as well be 
out of the race. And even of those who persevere to the 



2 Introduction 

end of the four years course, not a few will at last prove 
failures in it. The mere fact that a man has completed a 
college course is no assurance of success in life. ^^For many 
years it has been possible in New York City to employ at 
from ten dollars to twelve dollars per week large numbers 
of lawyers of over ten years standing who were graduates 
of both college and law school.'' 

So this new world in which the youth finds himself is not 
the magic world that he had supposed it to be. The tropic 
isles and Elysian fields are still far to seek. The college 
world is, in reality, the nearest approach to an enchanted 
realm that we shall ever find on earth; but there is sore 
danger that a youth may wander with Caliban and drunken 
Stephano into the thorny places and standing pools instead 
of into the cave of Prospero, the master m.agician. In a 
sense, the student within college walls does ^^ fleet the time 
carelessly as they did in the Golden World." Yet there 
must be some hewing of wood and drawing of water; there 
are flocks to tend; there is grubbing to do. One must, 
like stout Robinson Crusoe, bring off one's goods on rafts, 
and build oneself a house, and set it about with stakes, and 
explore, and develop, and defend the heritage the shores of 
which one has succeeded in reaching. Success during the 
first year at college depends upon common sense, upon work, 
upon decency and sobriety. If a boy has drifted in from 
^Hhe gold coast" to indulge in the luxury of a college course 
by special dispensation, his ship will find sure anchorage in 
no respectable college. The lazy, idle, vicious boy, who 
thinks of college life as being merely an opportunity to loaf 
and dissipate, to engage in athletics, and to recline in the 
elegant leisure of a sumptuous fraternity home, is doomed 
to failure, disappointment, and humiliation. 



The American College Under Fire 3 

II 

The American College Under Fire 

As a matter of fact, every college president and every 
college professor knows that the average Freshman is not 
such a youth as has just been described. We know that 
the great majority of Freshmen are bright, candid, earnest, 
and lovable boys who are coming up to college with a high 
and pure ambition to make the most of themselves and to 
make life count. But the American college is under fire. 
Many influential people think that our colleges are not 
justifying themselves; that Freshmen are, for the most 
part, noisy, lazy, conceited, dissipated young upstarts; 
that the average college graduate who goes into business 
is unable to hold his own with the boy who has gone directly 
from the high school into the office or the factory. These 
critics question whether what stands for a college education 
does not do a young fellow^ more harm than good. Men of 
standing and ability and wide knowledge of the world 
variously allude to the college as ^^a club for idling classes," 
^^a training school for shamming and shirking," ^Hhe most 
gigantic illusion of the age," a sort of '^educational vermi- 
form appendix." These men are disposed to think that a 
college diploma rarely assures intellectual discipline. One 
great journal affirms that '^ students nowadays get from 
their college life httle but educational disadvantages." 
And, worst of all, scores of our chief educators and educa- 
tional experts are sounding solemn notes of warning to 
college authorities as well as to undergraduates. We are 
told that our graduates are not as ''ripe and fit" for advanced 
professional study at twenty-three as the German students 



A Introduction 

are at twenty. It is charged that ''the college graduate is 
neither a trained nor a serious worker." President Gar- 
field of Wilhams thinks that college doors should be closed 
promptly and effectually against ''those who loaf because 
they choose to, and who do not propose to change their 
occupation." One brilHant educator does not beUeve that 
the public should be put to the expense of a thousand dollars 
per head in order that boys may go through college merely 
'' to enjoy themselves in drinking and in betting on athletics." 
President Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation for the 
Advancement of Teaching says, "the two objections generally 
brought against the college today are vagueness of aim and 
lack of intellectual stamina;" and Mr. Flexner declares that 
''a youth may win his degree on a showing that would in 
an office cost him his desk." 

These are serious charges that are brought against us, 
and it is well that the student should know about them 
from the start. In almost every case they are made by men 
whose opinion is worthy of consideration. Indeed, for the 
past ten years, the drift of public opinion in certain quarters 
has been setting powerfully against the college. Of course 
there is much to be said in reply to all this; and much has 
been said sanely and forcefully. College authorities are 
doing all that they can to make conditions better. But 
just now it is especially important that the entering student 
— that all undergraduates, indeed — should have clear 
ideas of the meaning of college life and should be heedful 
of the honor and prestige of the college. 

Why did you come to college? Have you a clear idea of 
what you are seeking here? Will the motive that prompted 
you to come bear scrutiny? Do you know what a college 
course really stands for? Did you just drift in? Or are 



What a College Education Really Means 5 

you here only because you were sent? Did you come merely 
to have a good time; to loaf; to enjoy the social life of the 
college; to join a fraternity; and to win and wear new 
and larger honors in athletics? The student who is actuated 
by no higher motives than these is not likely to be happy 
here. His studies will prove more or less of an annoyance 
to him, and the professors are sure to be a nuisance. Such 
a fellow will clutter things up, and get in the way of the busi- 
ness of the college. And even if he were allowed to ^^ply 
his music'' — allowed to shirk and dodge and temporize 

— he could not afford it; he would be ^ Spaying too dear for 
his w^histle." 

Ill 

What a College Education Really Means 

As I was reading a book by Dean Briggs of Harvard, the 
other day, I came across an expression that I like very much 

— ^Hhe difficult and windy heights.'' That suggests to 
my mind the real college atmosphere.- And it calls up 
images that make my blood tingle. It braces me for action. 
Is not the supreme object of a college education the strenu- 
ous pursuit of knowledge and the severe disciplining of the 
moral nature? The great Thomas Jefferson gives this as 
the object of higher education: ^^to develop the reasoning 
faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their 
morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and 
order; . . . and generally to form them to habits of reflec- 
tion and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue 
to others, and of happiness within themselves." The college 
is not a place for idleness and triviality, for sport and luxury, 
for the thousand and one absorbing side-interests that 



6 Introduction 

today make up the major part of college life. The college, 
says President Woodrow Wilson, ^^is for the training of the 
men who are to rise above the ranks." It is an arena for 
intellectual wrestling — a place where the soul is to practice 
its athletics. It is here that young men are to come to grips 
with themselves, and with the blood-red social and political 
problems of their own day. Here truth is to be sought and 
won — at whatever cost of personal comfort, or of previously 
cherished creed or dogma. Every old fellow who is now 
out in the world in the thick of the battle knows very well 
that it is not enough that he should carry away with him 
from campus and halls the memory, merely, of a ^^good time" 
at college. Such a memory is no doubt a luxury. But 
he knows that he should have gone forth from the college 
laden also with a store of such solid mental and spiritual 
wealth as should give dignity, charm, and authority to his 
later life. 

Not that scholarship and moral training exhaust the full 
intention of the college! The college ideal involves much 
more than this. ^^ Pleasure perfects labor, even as beauty 
crowns youth." The college world lies perpetually bathed 
in a purple mist of sentiment, romance, and youthful enjoy- 
ment. '^From towers and gardens are whispered Hhe 
last enchantment of the Middle Age.' " '^ It is a great thing," 
says one who styles himself ^^a mere don," *^to be able to 
loaf well; it softens the manners and does not allow them 
to be fierce; and there is no place for it like the streams 
and gardens of an ancient university." And, though our 
American colleges have not about them so much of vener- 
ableness as have those of England, and though our campuses 
lack much of the opulent beauty and exquisite quiet of their 
gardens, there is always in the spirit of youth a gift of ideali- 



What a College Education Really Means 7 

zation and romance sufficient to gild and enrich the environ- 
ment in which its lot is cast. So there will always be in 
any true college life this over-glow of sentiment, aspiration, 
comradeship, and pure physical enjoyment. Long before 
the day of ^^the tumult and the shouting" that has come 
to be such a distinctive part of modern college life, the sage 
Emerson wrote that sometimes, ^^What we do not call edu- 
cation is more gracious than what we do call so.'' He no 
doubt had reference to certain thrilling excursions that he 
now and then made on his own account into the unfre- 
quented paths of literature. He loved to browse in the 
dim, cool, and secluded fields of poetry and philosophy 
that were outside the required curriculum. But, however 
it may have been with Emerson, we all know that, over and 
above the regular course of study, educative influences of 
the highest importance play upon us and shape our thought 
and our character. Through friendships, through books, 
through solitude and society alike, through autumn walks, 
and long talks by the winter fireside, and through the soft 
pipings of Arcadian poets from forgotten fields of romance, 
as well as through the sharp, urgent call of the trumpet 
that summons to pubhc tasks in the living present, shall 
be woven for every alert man the fabric that we call a liberal 
education. A thousand experiences and passions will inter- 
twine to build up in him the full-rounded human soul. 

Even athletics finds a normal place in a complete scheme 
of liberal education. It is true that in the past there have 
been many gross evils wrapped up with college athletics. 
Too often our colleges have developed a one-sided athletic 
interest — stressing particular forms of sport to the exclu- 
sion of other games quite as worthy. Some of the more 
popular sports have demanded too much time and money 



8 Introduction 

and attention on the part of both faculty and students. 
There is, too, the constant temptation to bet on games and 
to spend much time in idle and boastful talk about athletes 
and athletic events. Worse still, a strong taint of profes- 
sionahsm has sometimes hung about our colleges; and not 
infrequently there has been undue roughness, and even gross 
fraud and brutality. Weak college presidents and unworthy 
faculties have lowered the standard of scholarship in the 
interest of the athlete, and sometimes have made unwar- 
rantable concessions to brilliant players in order to induce 
them to enter particular colleges. Most of these evils have 
been corrected or are being corrected. All honorable edu- 
cators will agree with President Jordan of Leland Stanford, 
that ^^the athletic tramp should receive no academic wel- 
come," and that ^^the athletic parasite is no better than 
any other parasite.'' 

But setting aside the evils of athletics that have done so 
much of late to discredit colleges in the eyes of plain, honest, 
sensible people, no one can deny that physical sports have 
an important place in a modern college. There can be no 
perfectly sane and healthful life apart from a strong, sound, 
WTll-developed body. Nor will any one deny that youth 
is the best time to train the body as well as the mind. There 
is, too, a necessity for youth to exert its over-plus of energy 
in joyous physical exercise. The play impulse is natural to 
grown-up life as well as to child life; and it is wholesome. 
It is a pity that some of our sour and dyspeptic ancestors 
did not find this out sooner. All wise men believe it now, 
and we are learning better how to play — how to secure 
recreation for mind and body. 

But it is college athletics that chiefly concerns us. All 
will agree with President Jordan, that ^Hhe color of life is 



What a College Education Really Means g 

red;" and every manly student will want to give a fair 
amount of time to outdoor sport, and will desire to make a 
place for himself in the athletic life of the college. And 
what are the chief benefits and values of college athletics? 
They are many: the spontaneous delight that any healthy 
boy ought to feel in competitive sports that try his skill 
and courage; the joy of comradeship in struggle and achieve- 
ment; the high and worthy sense of losing one's self in the 
spirit of the whole body; the legitimate pride and satis- 
faction that come from well-earned victory. And the real 
edge of this delight in victory comes from the realization 
that one has striven not so much for one's own glory as for 
the glory of the college. A certain Princeton man, ^Svhen 
his leg was broken in the foot-ball field, rejoiced that it was 
not one of the first team that was hurt." That w^as heroism 
in the making It is of the essence of education to be able 
to work with others to a common end. College athletics 
exalts the spirit of fair play. It inculcates true sportsman- 
ship. It requires one to ^^ play-up," and to play the game 
to the end. It teaches one to take defeat in a manly w^ay. 
The true college athlete despises the ^^ knocker," the ^'quit- 
ter," and the ^^ mucker." He is a good loser as well as a good 
winner, for he cares more for the game than he does for the 
victory. ^^A man may play a strenuous game, the fiercest 
ever seen on the gridiron," says one of our great college 
presidents, ^^and yet keep the speech and manners of a 
gentleman." Alertness, self-restraint, resolution, judgment, 
unselfishness, self-control under great provocation, and 
prompt decision in sudden emergency — these are some of 
the qualities that are developed by intelligent and honorable 
participation in college athletics. And these are physical, 
mental, and moral virtues well worth cultivation entirely 



lo Introduction 

apart from the transient delight and recreation that they 
afford. 

We could wish that more of the care and outlay that go 
to the training of stout Ajax, in order that he may be still 
stronger, and to swift Achilles, in order that he may become 
still fleeter, might be directed to the building up of the soft, 
fragile, and hollow-chested comrades of these mighty ath- 
letic heroes. ^The law of the Scriptures, that ^^ to him that 
hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be 
taken away even that he hath,"-^ieems to find its too literal 
fulfilment on our college fields. In American colleges we 
unduly emphasize certain forms of athletics; we cultivate 
the spectacular; and we make more of a business of ath- 
letics than a sport. Every student should receive physical 
oversight in the gymnasium; and every student should take 
some recreation in the open air. There are innumerable 
ways in which one may find congenial and relaxing exercise 
out-of-doors. In addition to the two or three forms of 
recreation that are sure to be duly stressed, there are tennis, 
lacrosse, rowing, swimming, skating, cross-country running; 
and, commonest of all, yet among all the most uncommonly 
good, the exercise of walking; better if it take the form of a 
tramp; and best of all if the tramp be taken in company 
with a chum or two, for then the exhilaration of vigorous 
physical exercise under the open sky amid a thousand en- 
trancing sights and sounds of nature will combine with the 
joy of comradeship and the intellectual stimulus of congenial 
talk. 

But, after all, the first and highest task is the making of 

" mental and moral muscle. It is the function of the college to 

tighten up a man's intellectual gearing. Men are in college 

to learn the value of discipline; to acquire the art of study; 



Freshman Difficulties and Dangers ii 

to establish habits of promptness, accuracy, and thorough- 
ness. Nothing whatever can take the place of these things, 
or make up for their absence. The essential thing in a 
college course will have been missed if the student fail to 
knit into the mental and moral fibre of his life something of 
the method, the endurance, and the resourcefulness that the 
army, the navy, the railroad systems, and the great busi- 
ness corporations demand of their men. In the world men 
have to bear their tests in the open. In the emergencies of 
life no allowances are made; we must make a passing grade 
unaided and on the spot. Dean West of Princeton exhorts 
college faculties that they 'Svill need to be resolute in teach- 
ing young men that there is no real education without well- 
directed effort; that it is not doing what a man likes or 
dislikes to do, but the constant exercise in doing what he 
ought to do, in matters of intellect as well as of conduct, 
whether he happens to like it or not, that turns the frank, 
careless, immature, lovable school-boy into the strong, well- 
trained man, capable of directing wisely himself and others." 



IV 

Freshman Difficulties and Dangers . 

It is a hard strain that the Freshman must bear during 
the first few weeks of the college year; yet this is the crucial 
time in his career. There are those who are unfit for college 
life, either because of stupidity, or indifference, or bad 
character. Such ought never to have come to college. The 
weeding out of such students is a process painful to all 
concerned. Through no fault of his own, a student may 
have come with poor preparation. He may be handi- 



1 2 Introduction 

capped because he has to make his own way; or, possibly, 
he comes too confident of his abihty or too dependent upon 
the social prestige that is back of him. He has broken 
home ties; he is in new and strange surroundings; he is for 
the first time in his life free to come and go as he pleases 
— master of his own purse, released from the supervision 
of either parent or teacher. All this gives him a sense of 
pride and elation; but he runs serious dangers. For this is 
just the period of life when one is almost as much a stranger 
to one's self as to one's surroundings. The transition from 
boyhood to manhood involves tremendous changes, both 
mental and physical. One is no longer quite a boy, yet 
he is not altogether a man. There is, therefore, more or 
less confusion within, more or less lack of coordination, 
and, possibly, a not altogether happy blending of diffidence 
and self-assertiveness. The youth is not entirely sure of 
himself; yet, for the world, he w^ould not have anybody 
suspect it. It is a time, too, w^hen the senses make the 
most urgent demands for present gratification, and when 
curiosity most strongly impels him to see and to know 
the world — to touch, to taste, and to handle. And, as 
likely as not, he has imbibed the foolish and terrible doc- 
trine that in order to know the world he must wallow in it. 
So a boy's curiosity, his appetite, and his imm.ature con- 
ception of w^hat it means to be a man seduce him into follies 
that neither time nor eternity can undo. 

Is it any wonder that friendly instructors are anxious 
about their Freshmen? They well know the difficulties and 
dangers that a Freshman must face as soon as he enters 
college. We have known scores of youth who, just at this 
juncture, have chosen to tread the ^^ primrose path of dalli- 
ance." Some professors are hard-hearted enough to stand 



Devotion to Boyhood Ideals 13 

coldly aside and ^^let Freshie try out." ^^ College/^ they say, 
"is a place for mistakes. Some will sink and some will 
swim. It is a case of the survival of the fittest, and let the 
devil take the hindmost." It is not to be denied that, in 
the last resort, every fellow must look out for himself and 
take what comes. Every student is given his liberty; and 
it is right that it should be so. The wisest educators believe 
that liberty is essential to sound and full development. But 
do not think "that to be a man is to test the things that any 
gentleman avoids." You have liberty to fall as wxll as to 
rise. You are free to choose the bad as well as the good. 
It stands within your choice to bind golden laurels of 
scholarship upon your brow, or to go straight to the devil. 
Bismarck is credited with saying that in the German uni- 
versities "one-third of the students work themselves to 
death, one-third drink themselves to death, and the other 
third govern Europe." 

V 

Devotion to Boyhood Ideals 

Men of the world are always sorry w^hen they see a young 
fellow under the stress of temptation, afraid to stand up for 
his ideals. The ideals that we held in our boyhood are the 
best that we shall ever have in this world. They are worth 
fighting for, and the truest and bravest men in this w^orld 
are the men who have carried the visions of their boyhood 
and their youth unsullied through the fierce battle-field of 
young manhood and middle life; or have stood ready gladly 
to die for them on some storm-swept summit at noon or 
evening-tide. Of course, a Freshman's horizon will expand, 
and he will come to see things in different perspective, and 



14 Introduction 

no doubt many of his ideas are crude, and his ways provincial. 
There is bound to come enlargement and enlightenment 
and readjustment. That is exactly Avhat the college life is 
for. He will, of course, not be a clam or a prig. He will, 
as a matter of course, usually go with the crowd, for the 
college crowd is usually going in the right direction. It is 
thus that he will lose his egotism, selfishness, and self-con- 
sciousness, and it is thus that he will get the rough edges 
knocked off his personality, and the wrinkles ironed out 
of his provincial training. So he should by all means go in 
heartily with his fellows whenever he can do so without 
sacrifice of moral principle and manhood. But let him not 
be afraid to assert himself w^hen honor is at stake, or an 
ideal is involved. There is a vital quality of religion that 
no man is above; and very low, indeed, is the man in w^hom 
the religious consciousness is dead. Hold stoutly to vital 
religion. The view^s of a college man with respect to non- 
essentials of theology and outward forms and habits of 
w^orship are likely to undergo a great change; but it will 
grow constantly plainer to him that the soul can find no 
substitute for religion. And most likely, as the years pass 
in college he will discover that, while his religious life has 
grown less dogmatic, less assertive, and more reticent, it 
has at the same time grown deeper and more assured, more 
tolerant, and natural, and helpful. Every student will 
need what aid he can get from the Sabbath, from the en- 
lightened religious services that a college town always 
enjoys, from the meetings of the Christian ^Associations of 
the college, from companionship and conversation with 
earnest and devout men among the upper classes and the 
faculty, and from the reading of religious books — as, for 
example, the poetry of Whittier and Tennyson, the sermons 



The Good Drudge Habit 15 

of Robertson, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks, and the essays 
of Drummond, Robert Speer, Dr. Grenfell, Washington 
Gladden, President Hyde of Bowdoin, and President King 
of Oberlin. These are only a few of the many sane, manly, 
and modern religious writings that are available in every 
college library. 

VI 

The Good Drudge Habit 

The habits that a Freshman forms are likely to go with 
him all through life to help him or to hinder him. Already 
he is an organized bundle of habits, for better or for w^orse; 
and in many respects he will never change his ways. But 
he may readily do so; for he is at an age when habits are 
extremely easy to take on or to lay off. His sense-impres- 
sions are so vivid and his nerve-tissue so plastic that he can 
remake himself into what he will, as easily as a workman 
can mold putty into this shape or that. Most of his personal 
habits are fixed and will never be reshaped. If he gives 
scrupulous attention to the care of his person now — in 
matters of the toilet and affairs of dress — he will be tidy and 
orderly and cleanly when he is threescore and ten. If he is 
indifferent to these things now, he will be still more indif- 
ferent to them when he grows old. And so with table and 
drawing-room manners, with habits of articulation, pronun- 
ciation, spelling, and handwriting; the youth who has been 
correctly trained in all these things may let his will go 
on a vacation or set it to work at some higher employment, 
for the good drudge Habit will demand no holiday, but will 
stay right by his task. It is not too late for the college 
student to remedy any defects of dress or behavior that he 



y 



1 6 • Introduction 

may grow conscious of as he meets his more fortunate 
fellows. He is at college for the purpose of remedying such 
defects. Let him mark closely the dress, the bearing, the 
speech of such acquaintances — students as well as instruc- 
tors — as have won his approval; and, while not imitating 
them in any slavish way, let him note and emulate whatever 
in them he may find worthy of emulation in taste, ease, 
grace, or high-breeding. 

And particularly, it is during the Freshman year that a 
youth must catch the secret of study. Few high school 
pupils have learned how to study. But it is now^ of the 
highest importance that the art of study be mastered. This 
is the appropriate time to establish correct mental habits. 
Mental discipline is quite as large an element in education as 
the storing away of facts — the gaining of knowledge. So 
if the student would avoid waste of time and frequent failure, 
he ought to learn to study at once. He must learn how to 
lay hold of a given lesson and how to lay it out. He must 
define to himself what the subject of the lesson is that he 
has been set to learn — what lies at the heart of it. He must 
set about the mastery of the lesson systematically. It will 
not do merely to define the main purpose of the lesson; he 
must analyze it, so that he may come to a clear knowledge 
of what is most important and what is least important. 
Let him concentrate the w^hole powxr of his mind upon the 
task that he has before him at any given time. He will 
thus save untold waste. If the subject is not naturally 
interesting to him, he may be able to bring to the problem 
some interest from outside — the desire to outstrip a rival, 
or to give pleasure to his parents by getting good marks, or 
to convince an instructor of his real power. A young stu- 
dent must often take himself sternly in hand, and by a sheer 



TJie Good Drudge Habit 



6' 



act of will-power compel himself to march up to a difificult 
task and do it. And one must learn thoroughness as well 
as concentration. There must be no slackness or vagueness. 
Every inch of the ground must be covered; and the student 
must see clearly the logical connection of one part with 
another. 

Study hours should be carefully planned. The hard- 
est problems should be attacked when the mind is freshest, 
and odd bits of time should be utilized. It is well to remem- 
ber that the mind sometimes gets so fagged that it is unable 
to do its work well, and that at such times it is better to give 
over mental effort for a season. Later it may be resumed 
with added zest and reinforced energies. Sometimes it 
will be best for the student to throw aside his books entirely 
for a good walk or a lively game in the open air. It would 
be a safe and innocent thing once in a while to go to bed at 
ten or eleven o'clock for a good night's sleep. The student 
should learn how to sprout a thought and then go aw^ay and 
let it develop in its own way — how to let the mind lie 
passive as well as how to spur it actively to its goal. The 
thoroughly trained mind may be trusted to carry on much 
of its work without conscious supervision. It is sometimes 
a merit to cram, but never except as a practice in discipline, 
or in case of an honest exigency. And examinations are 
not without their solid benefits to the serious student. They 
give training in analysis and proportion; they compel one 
to discriminate; they demand that the mind grasp and 
hold a vast quantity of information for instant use; and 
they train the mind to sustained effort. An examination 
tests one's bottom, and gives evidence of one's staying 
powers. 



i8 Introduction 

VII 

The Choice of Studies and the Choice of a Life- Work 

It is exceedingly difScult to offer definite advice to the 
student concerning the choice of his studies; for educators 
are far from agreed upon this point. Besides, each student 
must be dealt with as a unit. The conditions that enter 
into the making of a choice are not the same with any 
two Freshmen. One thing is certain, though: the student 
^ should exercise the greatest possible care in choosing his 
course of study. Before coming to college he will have 
sought the advice of parents and friends and teachers, and 
will himself have tried to find out what his own purposes, 
tastes, and aptitudes are. After he has reached college, he 
should not hesitate to go to members of the faculty with 
his perplexities. Most instructors are eager to help a stu- 
dent and are glad to be on confidential terms with him. 
"But after all it is you who are to live the life, and do the 
work, and succeed or fail;'' so in the long run the student 
must make the decisions. But, on the other hand, few 
decisions are final and fateful. Life is a running battle, 
and many a brave and intelligent fighter shifts his position 
in the midst of the fray. It may be that before you have 
completed your first term you will discover that you have 
not chosen wisely. Or, perhaps, you will find by the time 
you have finished your Freshman year that you are on 
the wrong track. It will not be too late to change 
your course. What you do, do thoroughly and well, 
whether you like it or not; and do not drop any work, or 
make any alteration in your plans, without full and 
friendly consultation with the officers and instructors in- 
volved in the change. 



Choice of Studies and of Life-Work 19 

Many Freshmen come up to college with a perfectly 
definite Hfe purpose before them. They have decided what 
profession to pursue or what business to engage in, and 
they know just what course they want to take. It gives one 
a comfortable feeling to have this momentous question of 
a life occupation disposed of once for all. But you should 
not be unduly anxious if you have not yet decided what 
you will make of yourself. One of the best things about a 
college course is that it affords just the leisure that a young 
man needs to test himself, to think over his problems, and 
to discover what he is fitted for. It is a time of growth, 
expansion, and enlarging vision; and it is very likely that 
when you fully come to yourself you will choose at higher 
intellectual and moral altitudes than would have been 
possible without the influence of the college. And here, 
again, it may help you to know that many — very many — 
of the wisest and most successful men, even after they have 
completed a college course, have not at once found their 
true sphere of activity. Some of them have stumbled and 
blundered more than once before they have been able to 
gain sure footing in the profession for which at last they 
find themselves precisely fitted. And no honestly-chosen 
course of study faithfully carried through, whether pursued 
for a year or four years, proves a waste. You have gained 
fair returns and have secured discipline, and in the end there 
will be Httle that cannot be turned to account. 

A vital and determining question that the Freshman 
may well ask himself at the outset is : Do I want to choose 
my studies primarily with reference to my hfe vocation, or 
shall I select with chief reference to general culture? One 
of the dangers for the man w^ho has decided upon his life- 
work before he comes to college is that he may from the very 



20 Introduction 

first direct his attention too exclusively to vocational sub- 
jects. If he begins to specialize early in his course, he will 
fail to secure the breadth and the rich humanizing influences 
that a college man is privileged to have. It is to be feared 
that such a student will fail to lay a foundation broad 
enough for future eminence in his profession; and it is 
certain that he will realize when it is too late that he has in 
large measure cut himself off from the full enjoyment of a 
cultivated life. He will feel the lack of '^ sweetness and light.'' 
There is a probability, even, that he may find himself un- 
fitted to respond fully to the social and civic forces that surge 
at his very door and electrify the very air he breathes. 

On the other hand, the youth w^ho chooses the all-around 
courses must beware lest he become a mere loiterer by the 
way, selecting here a course and there a course without plan 
or objective. It is all too easy for him to become an elegant 
idler — without logical training, without moral discipline, 
without any symptom of sound scholarship. The elective 
system sometimes proves a curse to the idle, ill-grounded, 
ill-guided Freshman. It seems hardly possible that any 
youth could enter college with such notions of the academic 
life as those portrayed by Mr. Birdseye in his book on 
Individual Training in Our Colleges. But Mr. Birdseye 
is serious and well-informed, and recently through his books 
has rendered valuable service to higher education in America. 
And what he says is constantly being emphasized by the 
leading college authorities. Here is the passage that I 
have in mind, ^'In the absence of any official guide, a 
considerable proportion of the students have devised a 
theory and plan of their own about as follows: 'We are 
aiming to get a diploma. A certain number of marks by 
the faculty, based upon cramming, examinations, and not 



Choice of Studies and of Life-Work 21 

overcutting, give us a diploma. There are many things in 
college more important than studies — although they do not 
count in getting a diploma — such as athletics, from the 
bleachers or on the team; social, fraternity, literary, and 
other practical subjects; and seeing life, which may mean 
some vice — gambling, intoxication, and a little extra loaf- 
ing for good measure and to carry out what we understand 
to be college custom. For these reasons, we shall elect the 
"softest'' courses, with the easiest professors, and coming 
if possible in the mornings, so that we can have all our 
afternoons and evenings for more important duties. With 
"trots'' and other extraneous helps, we can easily get the 
marks which give us a diploma.' " 

There is, as a matter of fact, no reason why a student 
already definitely bent toward a specialty, w^hether pro- 
fessional or business, may not elect largely from the cul- 
tural and humanizing subjects that lie at the foundation 
of any truly liberal education, and still during the last 
two years in college choose with constantly narrowing 
accuracy with reference to his specialty. Nor, on the other 
hand, is there any reason why one who believes that in the 
languages (in English and the classics, particularly), in 
history and civics and sociology and philosophy lie the 
essentials of a genial and humane culture, should not elect 
generously from mathematics and the physical sciences — 
why he might not, indeed, in some one field of science gain 
not only some knowledge of the fundamental principles of 
that study, but also some idea of scientific method, some 
skill in technique, some salutary sense of the rigor and 
accuracy that go to the making of a scientist. 

Finally, the Freshman is not too young to realize that any 
college course is a failure that does not fit a student for 



22 Introduction 

service to society. Boys of sixteen and eighteen years 
have borne arms upon the field of battle, and have sought 
and found glorious death in order to insure stability and 
perpetuity to the nation, to win justice for the oppressed, 
and to keep the flame of liberty alive in the hearts of men. 
Why should you not strive with equal ardor and unselfish- 
ness to keep the holy flame of truth burning before the eyes 
of men; to keep our civil institutions unsullied from the 
touch of dishonor; and to push aside the hand of injustice 
and cruelty that brings the cry of anguish from the weak 
and the helpless, and that lays upon the bent and bruised 
back of ignorant labor burdens that are too heavy to be 
borne? To you much has been given; and it is only fair 
that you should give much in return. Your education has 
cost vastly more than came out of your own pocket or out 
of the pockets of your parents, lavish as they have been. 
You do not know just what service you will be called upon 
to render a quarter of a century from now. It may be 
obscure; it may be distinguished. But, be the demand that 
the State is to make upon you in the future what it may, 
the service that you owe just now, in this Freshman year 
of your college course, is that of organizing within the round 
of that self that you call yours such physical stamina, such 
intellectual vigor, such seasoned moral fibre, such ideals of 
purity, justice, and honor, and such a disciplined and fear- 
less will as shall prepare you to meet the emergency when 
the bugle note of duty sounds — no matter how remote the 
day, no matter where the battle-line may be drawn, no 
matter what the assignment may be. Your duty now is 
to be master of yourself that you may later be the master 
of destiny — the champion of mankind in its hour of need. 



THE AFTER-SELF 1 

By president DAVID STARR JORDAN 

Leland Stanford Junior University 

The young man's first duty is toward his after-self. So 
live that your after-self, the man you ought to be, may be 
possible and actual. Far away in the twenties, the thirties 
of our century, he is awaiting his time. His body, his brain, 
his soul are in your boyish hands today. He cannot help 
himself. Will you hand over to him a brain unspoiled by 
lust or dissipation, a mind trained to think and act, a nervous 
system true as a dial in its response to environment? Will 
you, college boy of the twentieth century, let him come in 
his time as a man among men? Or will you throw away 
his patrimony? Will you turn over to him a brain dis- 
torted, a mind diseased, a will untrained to action, a spinal 
cord grown through and through with the vile harvest we 
call ^^wild oats"? Will you let him come taking your place, 
gaining through your experiences, your joys, building on 
them as his own? Or will you wantonly fling it all away, 
careless that the man you might have been shall never be? 

In all our colleges we are taught that the athlete must 
not break training rules. The pitcher who smokes a ciga- 
rette gives away the game. The punter who dances loses the 
goal, the sprinter who takes a convivial glass of beer breaks 

^ Reprinted from The Voice oj the Scholar, page 237, by special permission 
of the author and publishers, Paul Elder and Company, San Francisco. 



24 The After-Self 

no record. His record breaks him. Some day we shall 
realize that the game of life is more strenuous than the 
game of football, more intricate than pitching curves, more 
difiScult than punting. We should keep in trim for it. We 
must remember training rules. The rules that win the 
football game are good also for success in business. Half 
the strength of young America is wasted in the dissipation 
of drinking or smoking. If we keep the training rules in 
literal honesty we shall win a host of prizes that otherwise 
we should lose. Final success goes to the few, the very 
few, alas, who throughout life keep mind and soul and body 
clean. 



AN ADDRESS TO FRESHMEN ^ 

By president WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE 

Bowdoin College 

A GRADUATE of Christ Church College, Oxford, recently 
remarked to me, '^One can have such a good time at Oxford 
that it's a great waste of opportunity to work/' The humor 
of this remark, however, was turned to pathos when his wife 
told me sadly that, ^^An Oxford training does not fit a man 
for anything. There is absolutely nothing my husband 
can do;" and then I learned that the only thing this thirty- 
year-old husband and father had ever done was to hold a 
sinecure political office, which he lost when the Conserva- 
tive party went out of power; and the only thing he ever 
expected to do was to loaf about summer resorts in summer, 
and winter resorts in winter, until his father should die and 
leave him the estate. Fortunately, American society does 
not tolerate in its sons so worthless a career; yet the philoso- 
phy of college life which was behind that worthlessness, 
translated into such phrases as ^^ Don't let your studies inter- 
fere with your college life," and " C is a gentleman's grade," 
is coming to prevail in certain academic circles in America. 

Put your studies first; and that for three reasons: First, v/ 
you will have a better time in college. Hard work is a 
necessary background for the enjoyment of everything else. 
Second, after the first three months you will stand better 

^ Reprinted from The Independent, October i, 1908, by special permission 
of the author and the publishers. 



?6 An Address to Freshmen 

with your fellows. At first there will appear cheaper roads 
to distinction, but their cheapness is soon found out. Schol- 
arship alone will not give you the highest standing with 
your fellows; but you will not get their highest respect with- 
out showing that you can do well something that is intel- 
lectually difficult. Third, your future career depends upon 
it. On a little card, five by eight inches, every grade you 
get is recorded. Four or eight years hence, when you are 
looking for business or professional openings, that record 
will, to some extent, determine your start in life. But 
you are making a more permanent record than that upon 
the card; you are writing in the nerve cells and films of your\^ 
brain habits of accuracy, thoroughness, order, power, or 
their opposites; and twenty, thirty, forty years hence that 
record will make or mar your success in whatever you 
undertake. . . . 

Make up your minds, then, to take a rank of A in 
some subject, at least B in pretty nearly everything, and 
nothing lower than C in anything. If you ask why I 
place such stress upon these letters, let me tell you what 
they mean. 

A means that you have grasped a subject; thought 
about it; reacted upon it; made it your own; so that you 
can give it out again with the stamp of your individual in- 
sight upon it. 

B means that you have taken it in, and can give it out 
again in the same form in which it came to you. In details, 
what you say and write sounds like what the A man says 
and writes; but the words come from the book or the teacher, 
not from you. No B man can ever make a scholar; he wnll 
be a receiver rather than a giver, a creature rather than a 
creator to the end of his days. 



William DeWitt Hyde 27 

C means the same as B, only that your second-hand in- 
formation is partial and fragmentary, rather than complete. 

D means that you have been exposed to a subject often 
enough and long enough to leave on the plate of your memory 
a few faint traces which the charity of the examiner is able 
to identify. Poor and pitiful as such an exhibition is, we 
allow a limited number of D's to count toward a degree. 

E means total failure. Two E's bring a letter to your 
parents, stating that if the college were to allow you to 
remain longer, under the impression that you are getting an 
education, it would be receiving money under false pretenses. 

Please keep these definitions in mind, and send a copy 
to your parents for reference when the reports come home. 

Whatever you do, do not try to cheat in examinations or 
written work. If you succeed, you write fraud , fraud, fraud, 
all over your diploma; and if you get caught — there will 
be no diploma for you. 

Your own interests and tastes are so much more impor- 
tant factors than any cut-and-dried scheme of symmetrical 
development, that we leave you free to choose your studies. 
At the same time, the subjects open to choice are so limited 
by conflict of hours, and the requirement of a major and 
minors, that you can hardly miss the two essentials of wise 
choice: the consecutive, prolonged, concentrated pursuit 
of one or two main subjects, and some slight acquaintance 
with each of the three great human interests — language 
and literature, mathematics and science, and history, 
economics, and philosophy. 

Having put study first, college life is a close second. 
College is a world artificially created for the express purpose 
of your development and enjoyment. You little dream how 
rich and varied it is. I was myself surprised in looking over 



28 An Address to Freshmen 

the records of the last senior class to find that the members 
of that class won four hundred and sixty-seven kinds of 
connection and distinction of sufhcient importance to be 
printed in the official records of college achievement. On 
the other hand, I was a little disappointed to find that one 
hundred and forty-two of these distinctions were taken by 
five men, showing that the law, ^^to him that hath shall be 
given,'' applies in college as well as out of it. Some colleges, 
like Wellesley, have attempted to limit the number of these 
non-academic points an individual student may win. 

Aim to win some of these distinctions, but not too many. 
Concentrate on a few for which you care most. Do you 
ask what they are? 

There are eight fraternities, each with its own chapter 
house and its committees for the control of its own affairs; 
twelve sectional clubs, covering most of the geographical 
divisions from which students come; a Christian Associa- 
tion of which a majority of the students, and a much larger 
majority of the best fellows among them, are members, and 
which every one of you ought to join, who wants help 
and support in living the life you know you ought to live, 
and is willing to give help and support to others in living the 
Christian life in college. There is the Deutscher Verein, the 
Rumania, the History Club, the Good Government Club, 
the Chemical Club, devoted to their special subjects; the 
Ibis, which represents the combination of high scholarship 
and good fellowship, and whose members, together with 
the undergraduate members of Phi Beta Kappa, are ex- 
officio members of the Faculty Club, a literary club com- 
posed of members of the faculty and their families. 

There is the Inter-fraternity Council; the Athletic Coun- 
cil; the Debating Council; there is the Glee Club; the 



William DeWitt Hyde 29 

Mandolin Club; the Chapel Choir; the College Band; the 
Dramatic Club; the Press Club; the Republican Club; 
the Democratic Club. We have three papers — the Quill 
for literature, the Orient for college news, the Bugle for 
college records and college humor. 

Besides, there are public functions with their manage- 
ment and their subjects: rallies, banquets, assemblies, Ivy 
Day, Class Day, college teas, fraternity house parties. 

Last, but not least, come athletics — baseball, football, 
track, tennis, hockey, fencing, gymnastics, cross-country 
running, with first and second teams, captains, managers, 
and assistant managers. 

With all these positions open to you in these four years, 
every one of you ought to find opportunity for association 
with your fellows in congenial pursuits, and training in 
leadership and responsibility in the conduct of affairs. 

As I said at the outset, taken apart from study these 
things are trivial, and absorption in them amoimts to 
little more than mental dissipation; but taken in their 
proper relation to study, which is your main purpose here, 
the social experience and capacity for leadership they give 
are so valuable that if you take no responsible and effective 
part in them, you miss the pleasantest, and in some respects 
the most profitable, part of what the college offers you. 

I suppose I ought to say a word about college temptations, 
though the man who enters heartily into his studies and 
these college activities will not be much troubled by them. 
That is the case with nine-tenths of the men who come here. 
But in every class there is a weaker 5 or 10 per cent, 
and I suppose this class of 191 2 is no exception. I suppose 
there are half a dozen of you who are already addicted to 
vicious practices, and half a dozen more weak fellows, who 



30 An Address to Freshmen 

are only waiting for some one to show them the ways before 
they fall into them. I do not know yet who you are; but 
within three months everybody here will know. Then we 
shall first do our best to change your plans; and if that 
fails, we shall promptly ask you to withdraw. You all 
know what these temptations are: they are the temptations 
of youth everywhere — smoking, drinking, gambling, and 
licentiousness. 

To begin with the least serious. There is nothing intrin- 
sically evil in the inhalation and exhalation of smoke. Among 
mature men, some are seriously injured by it; some appar- 
ently suffer little harm. Almost all youth of your age are 
seriously injured by it. 

In the first place, it weakens your heart and makes your 
nerves unsteady. In the second place, it destroys your 
power of mental concentration and makes you scatter- 
brained. These evils are generally recognized. The most 
serious consequence is not so well understood. The habitual 
smoker tends to become content with himself as he is; he 
ceases to wrestle earnestly with moral and spiritual prob- 
lems; falls out of the struggle to be continually rising to 
heights hitherto unattained. For the man who has attained 
his moral growth (if such there are) it is not so serious; but 
for the youth of eighteen or twenty it means arrested spir- 
itual development, and an easy-going compromise instead 
of the more strenuous ideals. As you go up in a college 
class the proportion of smokers falls; as you go down it 
rises. While the college does not make smoking directly a 
subject of discipline, it is no mere coincidence that nineteen 
out of every twenty students whom we send away for either 
low scholarship or bad conduct are inveterate smokers. 
If you train for an athletic team you have to stop smoking 



William DeWitt Hyde 31 

while training; if you are in the most earnest training for 
Hfe, you will leave it off altogether. 

Drinking, however excusable a consolation for hard-worked 
men of meager mental and social resources, is inexcusable 
in young men with such a wealth of physical, intellectual, 
and social stimulus about them as college life affords. All 
the fraternities, of their own accord, exclude it from their 
chapter houses. Any student who injures himself or others 
by this abuse is liable to be requested to leave college in 
consequence. 

Gambling is so utterly inconsistent with the purpose for 
which you come here, and, when once started, spreads so 
insidiously, that we always remove a student from college 
as soon as we discover that he is addicted to the practice. 

Licentiousness involves such a hardening of the heart of 
the offender, such an anti-social attitude toward its victims, 
and brings such scandal on the institution, that "notorious 
and evil livers'' in this respect are quietly, but firmly, 
removed at the end of an early year or term. 

In dealing with these offenses, we hold no legal trial; 
we offer no formal proof of specific acts; we do not always 
succeed in convincing either students or parents of the 
justice of our action. In a little community like this, where 
everybody is intensely interested in everybody else, we 
know with absolute certainty; and, while we cannot always 
make public the nature and source of our knowledge, we 
act upon that knowledge. If this seems arbitrary, if any 
one of you does not wish to take his chance of summary 
dismissal without formal proof of specific charges, on any 
of these grounds, he would do well to withdraw voluntarily 
at the outset. This is our way of dealing with these matters, 
and you have fair warning in advance. 



32 An Address to Freshmen 

Such is college work; college life; college temptations. 
A million dollars in building and equipment; another 
million of endowment; the services of a score of trained, 
devoted teachers; the fellowship of hundreds of alumni, 
fellow-students, and younger brothers who will follow in 
the years to come; the name and fame, the traditions and 
influence of this ancient seat of learning; the rich and varied 
physical, intellectual, and social life among yourselves — 
all are freely yours on the single condition that you use them 
for your own good, and to the harm of no one else. 



THE PRINCIPLE OF HABITS 

Its Ethical and Pedagogical Importance 

BY WILLIAM JAMES 

"Habit a second nature! Habit is ten times nature/' 
the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed; and the 
degree to which this is true no one probably can appreciate 
as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself. The daily 
drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man 
completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his 
conduct. 

"There is a story," says Professor Huxley, "which is 
credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical 
joker who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his 
dinner, suddenly called out, ^Attention!' whereupon the 
man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton 
and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, 
and its effects had become embodied in the man's nervous 
structure.'' 

Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been 
seen to come together and go through their customary evolu- 
tions at the sound of the bugle call. Most domestic beasts 
seem machines almost pure and simple, undoubtingly, 
unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the duties they 
have been taught, and giving no sign that the possibility 
of an alternative ever suggests itself to their minds. Men 

^ Reprinted by permission from Psychology, Briefer Course, copyright, 
1892, by Henry Holt and Co., New York. 



34 The Principle of Habit 

grown old in prison have asked to be readmitted after being 
once set free. In a railroad accident a menagerie tiger, 
whose cage had broken open, is said to have emerged, but 
presently crept back again, as if too much bewildered by 
his new responsibilities, so that he was without difficulty 
secured. 

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most 
precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us 
all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children 
of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone 
prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from 
being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It 
keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the 
winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the 
countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through 
all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the 
natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all 
to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture 
or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that 
disagrees, because there is no other for w^hich w^e are fitted, 
and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social 
strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you 
see the professional mannerism settling down on the young 
commercial traveler, on the young doctor, on the young 
minister, on the young counsellor-at-law\ You see the little 
lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks 
of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the " shop," in a word, 
from w^hich the man can by-and-by no more escape than his 
coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On 
the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the 
world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character 
has set like plaster, and will never soften again. 



William James 35 

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical 
one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits, 
the period below twenty is more important still for the 
fixing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocali- 
zation and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address. 
Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken with- 
out a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth transferred 
to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other 
vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his 
growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much 
money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress 
like a gentleman born. The merchants offer their wares 
as eagerly to him as to the veriest "sw^ell," but he simply 
cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong 
as gravitation, keeps him w^ithin his orbit, arrayed this year 
as he was the last; and how his better clad acquaintances 
contrive to get the things they wear will be for him a 
mystery to his dying day. 

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our 
nervous system our ally instead of our enem.y. It is to fund 
and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the 
interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and 
habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, 
and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to ^ 
be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the 
plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can 
hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more 
our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own 
proper work.^ There is no more miserable human being 
than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and 
for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every 
cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the 



36 The Principle of Habit 

beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express 
volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man 
goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought 
to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his 
consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet 
ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very 
hour to set the matter right. 

In Professor Bain's chapter on *'The Moral Habits'' 
there are some admirable practical remarks laid down. 
Two great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first 
is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off 
of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as 
strong and decided an initiaiive as possible. Accumulate all 
the possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right 
motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that en- 
courage the new way; make engagements incompatible 
with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in 
short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. 
This will give your new beginning such a momentum that 
the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it 
otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown 
is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all. 

The second maxim is. Never suffer an exception to occur 
till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse 
is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is care- 
fully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great 
many turns w^ill wind again. Continuity of training is the 
great means of making the nervous system act infallibly 
right. As Professor Bain says: 

^^The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing 
them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of 
two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the 



William James 37 

ascendant over the other. It is necessary, above all things, 
in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on 
the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the 
right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate 
the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of 
uninterrupted successes until repetition has fortified it to 
such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, 
under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best 
career of mental progress." 

The need of securing success at the outset is imperative. 
Failure at first is apt to damp the energy of all future 
attempts, whereas past experiences of success nerve one to 
future vigor. Goethe said to a man who consulted him 
about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers, ^^Ach! 
you need only blow on your hands!" And the remark illus- 
trates the effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habitually 
successful career. 

The question of ^^tapering-off" in abandoning such habits 
as drink and opium indulgence comes in here, and is a ques- 
tion about which experts differ within certain limits, and in 
regard to what may be best for an individual case. In the 
main, however, all expert opinion would agree that abrupt 
acquisition of the new habit is the best way, if there be a 
real possibility of carrying it out. We must be careful not 
to give the will so stiff a task as to insure its defeat at the 
very outset; but, provided one can stand it, a sharp period 
of suffering, and then a free time, is the best thing to aim 
at, whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in 
simply changing one's hours of rising or of work. It is 
surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be 
?tever fed. 

**One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the 



38 The Principle of Habit 

right nor left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow 
path, before one can begin Ho make one's self over again/ 
He who every day makes a fresh resolve is like one who, 
arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to leap, forever stops 
and returns for a fresh run. Without unbroken advance 
there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces 
possible, and to make this possible, and to exercise us and 
habituate us in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular work." ^ 

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: 
Seize the very first opportunity to act on every resolution you 
make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience 
in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in 
the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their 
producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations com- 
municate the new *^set" to the brain. As the author last 
quoted remarks: 

*^The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone 
furnishes the fulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by 
means of which the moral will may multiply its strength, 
and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid ground to press 
against will never get beyond the stage of empty gesture- 
making." 

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, 
and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one 
have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity 
to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for 
the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially 
paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the prin- 
ciples we have laid down. A ^Hharacter," as J. S. Mill 
says, ^^is a completely fashioned will"; and a will, in the 
sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies 

^ J. Bahnsen, Bcitrage zu Charaktcrologie, (1867), vol. i. p. 209. 



William James 39 

to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the 
principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only 
becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the 
uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually 
occur, and the brain ^' grows'' to their use. When a resolve 
or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without 
bearing practical fruit it is worse than a chance lost. It 
works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emo- 
tions from taking the normal path of discharge. There 
is no more contemptible type of human character than 
that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer who spends 
his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but 
who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflam- 
ing all the mothers of France by his eloquence to follow 
Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends 
his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical 
exam.ple of what I mean. But everyone of us in his measure, 
whenever, after glowing for an abstractly formulated Good, 
he practically ignores some actual case among the squalid 
^^ other particulars" of which that same Good lurks disguised, 
treads straight on Rousseau's path. All Goods are dis- 
guised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a- 
day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them 
when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The 
habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will pro- 
duce true monsters in this line. The weeping of the Russian 
lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her 
coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the 
sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring 
scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for 
those who are neither performers themselves nor musically 
gifted enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has 



40 The Principle of Habit 

probably a relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes 
filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompt- 
ing to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition 
is kept up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one's 
self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it 
afterward in some active way. Let the expression be the 
least thing in the world — speaking genially to one's grand- 
mother, or giving up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing more 
heroic offers — but let it not fail to take place. 

These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply 
particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of dis- 
charge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain. 
Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way 
of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we 
often flinch from making an eft'ort, before we know it the 
effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer 
the w^andering of our attention, presently it will wander 
all the time. Attention and effort are, as we shall see later, 
but two names for the same psychic fact. To what brain 
processes they correspond we do not know. The strongest 
reason for believing that they do depend on brain-processes 
at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, 
that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, 
w^hich is a material law. As a final practical maxim, rela- 
tive to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer something 
like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little 
gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically 
ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day 
or two something for no other reason than that you would 
rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws 
nigh it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand 
the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which 



William James 41 

a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does hnn no 
good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. 
But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salva- 
tion from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured 
himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic voli- 
tion, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand 
like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when 
his softer fellow-mortals are v^^innowed like chaff in the 
blast. 

The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the 
most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be 
endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than 
the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually 
fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the 
young but realize how soon they will become mere walk- 
ing bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their 
conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our 
own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every 
smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little 
scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, 
excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, ^'I 
won't count this time!" Well! he may not count it and a 
kind heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none 
the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibers the mole- 
cules are counting it, registering it, and storing it up to be 
used against him when the next temptation comes. Noth- 
ing we ever do is, in strict scientific hteralness, wiped out. 
Of course this has its good side as well as its bad one. As 
we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, 
so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts 
in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate 
acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety 



42 The Principle of Habit 

about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it 
may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the work- 
ing day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He 
can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine 
morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his 
generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. 
Silently, between all the details of his business, the power 
of judging in all that class of matter will have built itself 
up within him as a possession that will never pass away. 
Young people should know this truth in advance. The 
ignorance of it has probably engendered more discourage- 
ment and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous 
careers than all other causes put together. 



HOW TO STUDY 

By FRANCIS CUMMINS LOCKWOOD 



The American wizard, Thomas Edison, frequently becomes 
so absorbed in the work of his laboratory that he forgets 
all about his meals, and occasionally even goes without 
sleep for long periods in order that he may hold his mind 
uninterruptedly to a given task. Sir William Hamilton, the 
great Scotch philosopher, gives like instances of mental 
absorption on the part of certain scholars of the past. Some 
of these stories are so interesting that they are worth repeat- 
ing here. 

"Archimedes, it is well known, was so absorbed in a 
geometrical meditation that he was first aware of the storm- 
ing of Syracuse by his own death- wound, and his exclamation 
on the entrance of Roman soldiers was — Noli turbare cir- 
culos meos. In like manner, Joseph Scaliger, the most 
learned of men, when a Protestant student in Paris, w^as so 
engrossed in the study of Homer that he became aware of 
the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and of his own escape, 
only on the day subsequent to the catastrophe. The phi- 
losopher, Carneades, was habitually liable to fits of medita- 
tion so profound that, to prevent him from sinking from 
inanition, his maid found it necessary to feed him like a 
child. And it is reported of Newton that, while engaged 
in his mathematical researches, he sometimes forgot to 
dine. Cardan, one of the most illustrious of philosophers 



44 How to Study 

and mathematicians, was once, upon a journey, so lost in 
thought that he forgot both his way and the object of his 
journey. To the question of his driver whither he should 
proceed, he made no answer, and when he came to himself 
at nightfall, he was surprised to find the carriage at a stand- 
still and directly under a gallows." 

No doubt such stories seem queer to the American college 
student of our day, for we are not accustomed to associate 
mental application with the term college student. Says 
Professor Lounsbury of Yale — and he is writing about a 
college student — "We must view with profound respect 
the infinite capacity of the human mind to resist the intro- 
duction of useful knowledge." And it was another New 
England professor who said to me in a letter not long ago, 
''We take great care of the Freshman's body now-a-days — 
make him strip and pass a physical examination, and thump 
him all over, then give him required courses in hygiene, and 
make him go through stunts in the gymnasium every day. 
I think it is time we taught him to use what he calls his 

mind." 

I wonder sometimes if we parents and professors are not 
ourselves a good deal to blame for the thriftless mental 
habits of our students. It seems to me that we have taken 
too little pains to direct them in the art of study and to 
come to some semblance of an agreement as to what consti- 
tutes the essentials of collegiate education. Not undeserved 
was that biting sarcasm in a British newspaper to the effect 
'Hhat in University matters, as in social and pohtical affairs, 
America does not know where she is going, but is determined 
to get there." Indeed, it was a professor who wrote, "The 
collective unwisdom of a college faculty is not often ex- 
ceeded by an individual student." And as an indication of 



Francis Cummins Lockwood 45 

the fact that college authorities may be very obtuse, and that 
college students may be very acute, I may allude to that 
copy of the catalogue of a certain institution, wherein some 
student had added as rule 119 in the regulations, ^'Any 
student who can understand these rules will be granted a 
degree without further examination/' At any rate, who- 
ever is at fault, it is high time that we should set ourselves 
to remedy defects that are apparent to all. 

If a man is not a student, he has no right to a place in 
college. A man gets into a college in order to learn, just 
as a seaman gets into a ship in order to sail the seas. If 
the sailor will not go aloft — will not rub and scrub — he 
has no right to be on board. And just so a student, if he 
will not read and write, and grub and think, has no excuse 
whatever for being in a college. The college that allows 
men that do not study, and who have no intention of study- 
ing, to remain enrolled in long-continued idleness is degrad- 
ing itself, robbing the student, and betraying the state. 



II 

And what are the real aims of study? The object of study 
is, in the first place, to get fast and firm possession of facts 
— facts of spelling, reading, mathematics, composition, 
history, language, geography, and the like. It is highly 
desirable that we should know how to spell Chicago and 
business; Boston and brains; and that we should know for 
all time. We want to know once for all that seven times 
nine are sixty- three; that Abraham Lincoln signed the 
Emancipation Proclamation; that an island is a body of 
land completely surrounded by water; and that a proper 
name should begin with a capital letter. Many, many, 



46 How to Study 

minute facts, as well as certain connected bodies of truth, 
should be embedded in one's memory as deeply and se- 
curely as a bullet that has lodged in the heart of a growing 
tree. And one should master certain processes of thought, 
and grip a few great underlying and unchanging principles 
of life and conduct. 
Yet the chief value of study does not he in the stowing 
■/ away of facts and principles. You study for discipline. 
You study in order that you may become a student, just as 
you exercise, not for recreation alone, but that you may 
become an athlete. In making yourself a student you are 
making yourself fit for the fierce intellectual encounters of 
middle life. No time for training then! And woe to him 
whose brain-fiber is flabby then, w^hose mental processes are 
slow and hazy and uncertain! Your mind must work with 
the force and steadiness of a piston-rod; must clutch like 
a vise. You will be pitted against antagonists worthy of your 
mettle. They will not sleep; nor will they let you sleep dur- 
ing the long day of strain in the court-room, on the stump, 
in the halls of legislation, at the editorial desk, in the count- 
ing-house, where the tides of traffic run full and hot, and 
where masters of finance and captains of industry sit secretly, 
silently, astutely making or marring your fortunes or the 
fortunes of weak men and women whose champion you are. 
It may be that with knife or drug you shall suddenly be set 
in the lonely night to hold Death at bay in some terrified 
home, or on some tragic highway or byway. You are win- 
ning these crucial contests now by the precision and the 
promptness and the thoroughness that you are working into 
your higher nerve centers; by the severe training that 
you are giving yourself in attention, decision, mental 
alertness, and moral control. 



Francis Cummins Lockwood 47 

Again, it is worth while to study because there is nothing 
in the world so glorious as truth, nothing so fascinating as 
the pursuit of wisdom. Mind alone can unlock the meaning 
of the world, for the foundations of the universe are laid in 
spirit. If wt would be free we must think ourselves free. 
To the degree that we are ignorant we are slaves — slaves 
to wind and wave, to time and tide, to sin and pain, to man 
and devil and microbe. But to the extent that we study 
and think and gain wisdom we drive back the barriers of 
darkness and come into the full freedom of our own free 
spirits. There is in us a divine curiosity that urges us to 
perpetual inquiry. We are set in this world to solve riddles. 
We study because there burns within us an unquenched 
and unquenchable passion to uncover reality; to drive out 
the bogeys and the fetishes and the hoodoos that lurk in 
this human wilderness through which we are traveling. 
Study purifies and exalts the student. It loosens the 
bonds of Time and Space. Study enthrones a man with 
the gods. Through study we may escape into the infinite 
and the eternal; we may unite ourselves with God. 

There is, moreover, a knight-errantry of intellect as well 
as a knight-errantry of arms. A veteran editor said some 
years ago, ^'The College youths I see are — too many of 
them — merely bright fellows, with precocious worldliness; 
they seem not to have seen the Holy Grail that a man who 
has lovingly studied any great subject gets glimpses of. 
I doubt w^hether present American college life gives enough 
of this inner growth." It is not yet too late in the w^orld's 
history to experience ^^the luxury of doing some perpetual 
good in the world." The universe is still young — all alive 
with wonder and romance. It is true that brave men have 
at last touched the most remote point on this globe. The 



48 How to Study 

North Pole has been discovered; the South Pole has been 
discovered; a light has been cast into the heart of the Dark 
Continent. But the scholar is still to have his day. A 
thousand highways invite him forth upon his adventures. 
Giants still lurk in the morasses of civilization. A milhon 
secrets that the world waits anxiously to know lie locked 
away in dark castles, w^hich the bright sword of intellect 
alone can enter. 

''To what purpose should our thought be directed to 
various kinds of know^ledge," writes the young Sir Philip 
Sidney, ''unless room be afforded for putting it into practice 
so that public advantage may be the result? " What stronger 
incentive can we have to become students, scholars, and 
thinkers, than that suggested here by the great Sidney — 
that of enriching the Commonwealth, that of establishing 
America's cultural supremacy among the nations? She 
must have pioneers of thought as well as pioneer discoverers 
of her boundless material resources. No nation ever bred 
greater soldiers, greater statesmen, greater captains of 
industry than has America. But can we truly say that 
she has held her own in the realm of scholarship and culture? 

We hear continual complaints and warnings from our 
leading educators concerning the slackness of American 
boys in matters of study. American-born boys are con- 
tinually being outclassed by foreign-born boys in Our Ameri- 
can schools. The Oxford dons, during a half year that I 
recently spent at Oxford, often expressed to me surprise 
and disappointment at the character of the scholastic work 
done by American Rhodes scholars; and I could not fail 
to see that the American men did not shine in scholarship 
or intellectual achievement. There were some able and 
earnest students among them; they distinguished them- 



Francis Cummins Lockwood 49 

selves in athletics; and I was proud of their clean, strong, 
refined manhood. But they were not up to the mark in 
scholarship. How often has an American won the Nobel 
prize? Thrice recently it has come to America, but in two 
of the instances the victor was of foreign birth — Professor 
Michelson being a native of Germany and Dr. Carrel of 
France. I do not say that Americans are not inherently 
the equals of the men and women of any other nation. I 
believe that in mind and in body, and most of all in pure, 
sound morals, we are the superiors of any of the great peoples 
of the world. But I do say that, on the whole, we are not 
showing ourselves great students, great investigators, and 
great thinkers. Can an American student cherish any 
worthier ambition than that of conferring something intellec- 
tually great upon the Nation — and through the Nation 
upon mankind? Is it not worth while to strive to create an 
intellectual and spiritual America that shall outshine even 
the material America? 



Ill 

Study consists in focusing the mind upon the subject in 
hand. In very early life we have almost no power of volun- 
tary attention; and even the mature scholar can hold his 
mind on a given object only for an instant by his own will 
power. The little child scarcely has any mind that he can 
call his own. He lives out of doors, on the open highways of 
sensation. His mind is snatched hither and thither by the 
bright baubles and the entrancing sounds around him. He 
surrenders himself completely and on the spot to the last 
and gaudiest attraction that bids for his attention. We 
laugh at professors and philosophers for being absent-minded. 



50 How to Study 

In reality they are not absent-minded at all; they are so 
present-minded that they are utterly oblivious of their bodies 
and of everything around them. They have learned the art 
of study, and are giving attention mightily. With chil- 
dren — and with many college students — it is exactly the 
opposite. Their bodies are chained to the tasks before them, 
but their minds are absent on other and more attractive 
pursuits. Now the trouble with many Freshmen is that 
they are still children. They have never learned how^ to 
hold their attention closely and sternly to a set task. They 
are given to dawdling and to idle day-dreaming. They 
are at the mercy of every sensation and every enticement. 
An educated person learns ^'to do the thing he does not want 
to do, at the time he does not w^ant to do it." 

''I know a person, for example," writes William James, 
*Svho will poke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dust- 
specks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch up the 
new^spaper, take down any book which catches his eye, trim 
his nails, waste the morning anyhow^ and all without pre- 
meditation — simply because the only thing he ought to 
attend to is the preparation of a noon-day lesson in formal 
logic, which he detests. Anything but that!^^ What one 
of us does not see himself reflected in this description? 

In the long run the secret of study resides in our ability 
to bathe our thought, our task, our lesson in the stream of 
interest. The way to study successfully and joyously is to 
be interested in the thing that claims our attention. It is 
not hard to interest a boy in a dog, or a gun, or a swimming- 
hole. Dress and travel and baseball and automobiles and 
dinner-parties interest everyone. But how remote these 
things all seem from the stupid rules and theorems and 
outlines and repellent facts that we find staring at us from 



Francis Cummins Lockwood 51 

our text-books, and forever tripping us up in the class-room ! 
Yet, in reality, these two realms are not altogether removed 
from each other. There are connecting threads, if only we 
can find them. We must learn to carry over from the things 
that we do like, or the things that we are absorbed in, frag- 
ments or filaments of interest which may be attached to 
the dull or hated study that we must master. Of course 
the surest and most natural way to bring this about is to 
live such an alert, wide-awake, and sympathetic hfe that 
the world speaks our language at whatever point we accost 
it. It is well to have sensations and experiences and some 
slight information, at least, stored up from many sources. 
The greater our store of facts, images, experiences, and asso- 
ciations from the past, the more likely we are to find some 
point of contact between a nev/ subject and an old one, and 
so to transfer interest from one to the other. If a subject 
seems hopelessly dry, one may approach it in some such way 
as this: It has interested other m.en; why should I be a 
stranger to it? Or, let one say to one's self: This subject, 
whatever its attractiveness or lack of attractiveness, is the 
sort of thing that comes to life out there in the world — 
the sort of thing that men are stumbling over on every human 
highway. What I study now is related to what I am going 
to do hereafter. Somewhere, sometime, in a moment of 
doubt, or need, or loneliness, or crisis, this little, hard, un- 
attractive, apparently insignificant scrap of fact, bit of quo- 
tation, or statement of principle may saunter obligingly into 
my mind at need, and prove as wxlcome to me as would a 
comrade or a brother. One may study with the thought of 
future travel. ^'He that would bring home the wealth of 
the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.'' That is, 
we shall see only what we are prepared to see. Study with 



52 How to Study 

the thought of making yourself an interesting and resource- 
ful conversationalist. Study, again, for the rewards of 
scholarship; or if this is no incentive, study in order to win 
honor for your ''bunch," your fraternity, your family, your 
country. And study, finally, if no other interest serves, 
because you are a man. Says William James, "Pride and 
pugnacity have often been considered unworthy passions 
to appeal to in the young. But in their more refined and 
noble forms they play a great part in the school-room 
and in education generally, being in some characters most 
potent spurs to effort. Pugnacity need not be thought of 
merely in the form of physical combativeness. It can be 
taken in the sense of general unwillingness to be beaten by 
any kind of difficulty. It is what makes us feel 'stumped' 
and challenged by arduous achievements, and is essential 
to a spirited and enterprising character. We have of late 
been hearing much of the philosophy of tenderness in educa- 
tion ; ' interest ' must be assiduously awakened in everything, 
difficulties must be smoothed away. Soft pedagogics have 
taken the place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. 
But from this lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort 
is left out. It is nonsense to suppose that every step in 
education can be interesting. The fighting impulse must 
often be appealed to. Make the pupil feel ashamed of being 
scared at fractions, of being downed by the law of falling 
bodies; rouse his pugnacity and pride, and he will rush at 
the difficult places mth a sort of inner wrath at himself that 
is one of his best moral faculties. A victory scored under 
such conditions becomes a turning-point and crisis of his 
character. It represents the high-water mark of his powers, 
and serves thereafter as an ideal pattern for his self-imita- 
tion. The teacher who never rouses this sort of pugnacious 



Francis Cummins Lockwood 53 

excitement in his pupils falls short of one of his best forms 
of usefulness." ^ 

IV 

Bodily conditions largely affect mental activity. There 
is no team-work so essential as the team-work between brain 
and thought. The soil in w^hich thought is nourished is the 
fine grey nerve-matter of the brain. The intellectual har- 
vest from this brain-soil will depend upon two things — the 
original and inherited vigor of the nerve-cells of the brain, 
and the quantity and quahty of the blood with which they 
are suppHed. The dehcate grey nerve-matter of the brain 
requires much good blood. Indeed, the brain is not unlike 
a great sponge, and the harder one studies the more plenti- 
fully it must be saturated with pure, rich blood. Like any 
other physical organ, the brain becomes exhausted after 
long-continued mental effort, ^nd must have rest in order 
to regain its vitality. Prolonged hard thinking tears down 
and wears away the brain tissue. This waste matter, like 
a charred lamp-wick that retards the free supply of oil to 
the flame, must be carried off and replaced by fresh material. 
Sleep and exercise are the best means of working this change 
in the tired brain. And, always, much fresh air is required 
for this renewal. The m^ind is freshest and best fitted for 
hard work in the morning; so the severest tasks should be 
taken up as early in the day as possible. It is not a good 
thing, though, to study long and hard in the early morning 
before eating. On the other hand, it is poor policy to study 
late into the night; first, because the blood supply in the 
brain is then so charged wdth the products of decomposition, 

^ Talk to Teachers on Psychology, etc., pp. 54-55. Henry Holt and Co., 
New York. 



54 How to Study 

due to the wear and tear of the body during the activities 
of the day, that the mind cannot get clear and firm impres- 
sions; and, second, because the undue amount of blood that 
has been called to the brain tends to drive sleep away even 
after one quits work. Each student should study his own case 
carefully and find out when and how he can do the best work. 

Nor is it a good thing to study soon after a hearty meal; 
for, since the digestive organs are heavily taxed at this time, 
they summon a large supply of blood from the brain and 
the other parts of the body. And, since there cannot be 
a proper supply of blood in both places at the same time, 
either the digestive organs will be robbed of their supply, 
wdth the result that digestion cannot be carried on properly, 
or the brain will be so impoverished that it must of necessity 
do poor work. For this reason, too, meal-time should be 
an occasion for leisurely conversation and good-f ellow^ship ; 
and for the same reason the time for at least a half-hour 
after a hea\'y meal should be spent either in the enjoyment 
of a short nap; or with music or light reading; or in some 
form of agreeable and easy physical exercise. The serious 
student will think out carefully a daily program of study 
and then adhere to it as closely as he can without doing 
violence to common sense. 

Use your eyes with care. Do not strain them in the twi- 
light, or use them when the artificial light is bad. Do not 
sit with your face to the light; beware of a light too power- 
ful or dazzling. Sit so that the rays of light wdll fall over 
your shoulder upon the page before you. You wdll find it 
beneficial, when you are compelled to glue your eyes steadily 
to your task for a long period, to go to the window once in 
a while and relieve the eyes by focusing them for a brief 
time upon som.e distant object in the landscape. 



Francis Cummins Lockwood 55 

Study is made easier by providing for bodily comfort 
during the time that one is closely engaged in thought, since 
nothing should take away from the vividness of the impres- 
sion received by the nerve-cells. One should be seated com- 
fortably; should not be too cold or too hot; should not be 
pelted and battered and shot through with noises from the 
street. A wise student knows when he has studied on a given 
occasion to the limit of efl&ciency, and then gives over. But 
it is a mistake to suppose that one cannot work unless one 
is in the mood for it. A normal mind in a healthy body 
will work at need; and the best way to get the desired mood 
is to go to work. 

V 

We should go about the preparation of a lesson in some 
such way as a general would set about the capture of a city; 
or as an engineer would endeavor to solve the problem of 
supplying a city with pure water; or as a detective would 
undertake the task of ferreting out a crime; or as you, 
yourself, would try to start a rabbit from a brush-heap. 
There is something at the heart of the lesson, and you must 
get at this the first thing. Ask yourself, What is the main 
idea — the interpreting thought — of this assignment? 
WTiat is the key to this problem? What is the theme of this 
essay, the point at issue in this speech, the dominant or 
unifying emotion in this poem or drama? When once the 
student has seized this deeper inner meaning and has dragged 
it into the light, the minor points, the less important ideas, 
the illustrations, the examples — all these will fall into their 
proper places and will be easily understood and fully enjoyed. 

But the ideas involved in a lesson are not to be introduced 
into one's anatomy merely as dead lumps of truth. They 



56 How to Study 

are to be reacted upon. Independent processes of thought 
must be set in motion. A boy ought to be excited by a 
new idea just as he would be excited by fresh tracks when 
out hunting. The material presented for consideration 
must be passed upon. It is to be arraigned before the high 
court of one's own thought. Let us not be too modest to 
think. Doubtless the text-books are about right; and it is 
to be presumed that the professor knows vastly more than 
does the pupil; and no doubt wise heads have weighed the 
matter. But notwithstanding all this, the student now sits 
supreme. It is his court; he is trying the case for himself 
and not for another. 

The student must next organize the whole matter that 
has been brought before him in accordance with his own 
purpose and his own needs, so that he may carry away with 
him his own compact and usable kit of new and important 
information. There is a residuum of fact, or truth, or inspira- 
tion that results from the study of a given subject. This 
outcome of one's thinking, whether large or small, becomes 
a lasting personal acquisition. It is not merely the asset 
of an hour, but is a possession for all time. The student 
has it not by rote or merely on authority, but upon individual 
approval and acceptance. 

Finally, knowledge results in permanent enrichment only 
when it has been put into play; that is, it must be related 
to life and must flow out in action. This explains why 
instructors frown upon ''cramming." ''Crammed" infor- 
mation is for immediate use; and it passes away along with 
the crisis that led to its acquisition. It is, then, not to be 
thought for a moment that the final end or outcome of a 
college assignment is the presentation of it to the instructor 
in recitation or examination. That is to miss the point 



Francis Cummins Lockwood 57 

entirely. Knowledge that is worth while will become so 
much a part of the student that he will forget when and 
where he got it. Not only shall he have it; it will have him. 
That is, in so far as it is a workable thing, it will become 
habit. For example, you do not count yourself an expert 
with your gun, your camera, your automobile — nor do 
you get much enjoyment from them — until their manipula- 
tion has become second nature to you. In the same way, 
no lesson can ever be said to have been mastered until it 
has entered into and become a part of one. 

The sheer, brute w^ork of memorizing does not amount to 
so much as is commonly supposed. When important subject- 
matter has been dealt with in some such w^ay as has been 
suggested in the preceding paragraphs, one's nervous system 
wdll remember of its own accord. The things that have 
interested us supremely — that wt have considered w^orth 
w^hile and have made a part of ourselves — wx cannot forget. 
They have enmeshed themselves in our central being, and 
will always be promptly available. There are certain things 
such as spelling, the multiplication table, the facts of geog- 
raphy, and the Ten Commandments which had to be laid 
up in memory by an outright effort of the will by frequent 
repetition. There always will be a good deal of this pure 
memory work to be done; but, aside from stated demands 
of this kind, it will be of little avail simply to memorize 
mechanically. Besides, the quality of any individual memory 
is a fixed thing. One's memory is either good, bad, or 
indifferent by nature. Each person is endowed w^ith brain- 
stuff of a certain degree of power to take and hold impres- 
sions, and there will be no change of quality. Some minds 
are *Svax to receive and marble to retain," and some are 
quite the opposite. This is not to say that the memory of 



58 How to Study 

a given person may not be stronger and more retentive at 
one time than at another. Whatever strengthens or weakens 
the general state of bodily health — in particular the general 
condition of the nervous system — will no doubt affect the 
memory as well. But it seems certain that at bottom the 
memory does not yield to cultivation. 

Fortunately for most of us, however, that is not neces- 
sarily the best type of mind that has the most tenacious 
memory. It is a good sort of mind to have, but there are 
other qualities that may offset the lack of it. Some of the 
finest and most productive minds have been endowed with 
rather poor memory-stuff. The thing for a student to do 
is to find out and to practise the most approved methods 
of memorizing. That is all one can do; yet that may count 
for a good deal. Again, and finally, the best way to remember 
is to be so interested in a thing that one cannot forget it, 
and to connect it and inter-connect it with a thousand other 
interesting and familiar things. 



VI 

The student owes it to himself to preserve his intellectual 
independence and integrity. No one can think for him. 
He should let no one coerce his will, or secure his consent 
to what he does not believe. It is not the instructor but 
the student who is to have first consideration. The student 
is the supreme end for w^hich the college exists. The gentle- 
man will, of course, honor his instructors and will be con- 
siderate of them in every way. But the faculty is not the 
center of gravity of a college. A student has the right, as 
an honest and earnest seeker after truth, to weigh himself 
over against the whole college establishment, considered 



Francis Cummins Lockwood 59 

as an organization fitted to supply the need which led him 
to enter college. The worthy student puts his all into 
this college adventure — his money, four years of more 
than golden time, his chance for fruitful life friendships, his 
plastic capabilities. So he must know his rights and must 
expect and demand much. 



RECENT TENDENCIES IN COLLEGE 
EDUCATION 1 

By president DAVID STARR JORDAN 

Leland Stanford Junior University 

It has long been recognized that a four years' college 
course, after the course in the secondary school, and pre- 
ceding the course in professional training, holds the young 
man a very long time in school. Few men are prepared for 
college, as matters stand, before the age of seventeen or 
eighteen. Few graduate under twenty-one or twenty-two, 
and the professional school demands the years to twenty- 
four, twxnty-five, or twTnty-six. After this follows another 
year or two of petty beginnings, and by the time the young 
man is fairly under w^ay, he has reached the age of thirty. If 
from ill health, hesitation of policy, or for any other reason, 
the college course is delayed, the entrance on professional 
life becomes correspondingly later. By this process, the 
ancient rule of, ^'Rise early, before you are twenty-five, if 
possible," is persistently violated. 

There is no advantage in merely putting in time in college 
at the expense of serious w^ork outside. Every day in school 
should justify itself. Wherever time can be saved without 
sacrifice of results, it is a real gain in education. 

The college course has been systematically lengthened 

^ Reprinted from The Voice of the Scholar, bj' permission of Paul Elder 
and Co., San Francisco. 



David Starr Jordan 6i 

within the past twenty years. It has been made longer 
that it may be enriched and made effective. To this end, 
subject after subject of an elementary character has been 
thrown backward to the preparatory schools. In this, there 
are some advantages. The college with more advanced 
students becomes more serious and more enlightened. It 
offers a broader range of subjects, and touches the interests 
of a much larger number of men. 

On the other hand, pupils are often kept in their local 
high schools until they are tired of the place and tired of 
the work. Higher education begins when a boy leaves home 
and learns to depend on himself. Because the high schools 
have an inadequate and over-feminine teaching force, very 
many boys who might have been helped by a college educa- 
tion abandon school long before they are ready to enter 
college. There is a constant pressure on the preparatory 
school to undertake more work and to do it more rapidly. 
The preparatory school tries to do this, with some success 
and also with serious drawbacks, because the results are 
tested by the quantity rather than the quality of work 
done. 

The college has not yet devised a qualitative scale of ad- 
mission. Not how much the student knows, but what is 
the nature of his ability and training, should be the test of 
preparation. The college ought to insist that the student 
shall be able to go on with the higher work successfully, 
rather than that he should have to his credit such and such 
subjects, or their equivalents. But it is easier to make 
numerical estimates than to test the student's mettle. It 
is easier to measure cordwood than culture, and our tests of 
preparation are based on the method used in estimating 
cordwood. 



62 Receiit Tendencies in College Education 

The college should receive men whenever they are ready 
for its freedom and ready to do its work. If it can devise 
a sure method, it may ^'dip down'^ into the lower schools 
and take their best students when they have reached fitness 
for independent study. 

Having turned the freshman year of former days over to 
the preparatory schools, the college can now do correspond- 
ingly more in its senior year. Shall it use this time for 
general culture, or for professional training? Here the pres- 
sure to yield this year to the professional schools makes 
itself felt. In America, the professional schools have vainly 
tried to train men who have no foundation of knowledge or 
discipline; to make lawyers and physicians out of men wdth 
neither scientific knowledge nor literary culture. This has 
failed, and in its failure has brought all American profes- 
sions, except engineering, into disrepute. 

The reputable professional school demands, or will soon 
demand, a college education as a prerequisite for entrance. 
No man with less training than this can do specialized work 
in university fashion. The college course represents a degree 
of enlightenment and a kind of training without which 
professional success and usefulness are not possible. The 
extension of the elective system has enabled the college to 
meet the needs of all kinds of men of brains and force. To 
shorten the college course to three years is to yield the last 
year to the professional schools, and these sorely need the 
time. 

Another influence tending in this direction comes from the 
German educational system. In Germany, the local high 
school, or gymnasium^ takes, let us say, two of the years we 
give to the college. The professional school or university 
takes the rest. The university gives no general culture or 



David Starr Jordan 63 

general training. The gymnasium gives nothing else, and 
its curriculum is as rigid as that of the university is free. 

While German educators are considering the possible 
introduction of the college as an intermediate between the 
gymnasium and the university, there is in America a tendency 
toward the obliteration of the college, by merging its higher 
years into the university, its lower into the preparatory 
school. 

It is true that in the gymnasium students get on faster than 
in our high schools and preparatory schools. The German 
student is as far along in his studies at sixteen as the Ameri- 
can at eighteen. This is due to the fact that American life 
makes more outside demands on boys than life in Germany 
does. The American boy is farther along in self-reliance 
and in knowledge of the world at sixteen than the German 
at twenty. The American college freshman, especially if 
brought up in the West, knows a thousand things, outside 
of his books and more useful, because more true than most 
of what his books contain. He can ride, drive, swim, row, 
hunt, take care of horses, play games, run an engine, or 
attend to some form of business, while the German boy 
cannot even black his own shoes. As education is no per- 
quisite of the rich, the American boy has very likely been 
obliged to earn the money he spends on his own education. 
To do this he loses time in scholastic marks, but in the long 
run this is clear gain, provided that he does not abandon his 
education. The boy who graduates at twenty-four is often 
more than three years ahead of the one who takes his bache- 
lor's degree at twenty-one. To lose time in testing life is 
not a loss at all, and the American boy is the stronger for his 
early escape from leading strings. When his university 
training is over, he is not merely learned, he is adequate, 



64 Recent Tendencies in College Education 

and the higher ideal of personal effectiveness supplements 
the German ideal of erudition, or the English ideal of personal 
culture. 

It is proposed now to let a man graduate in three years, 
provided he can do four years' average work in that time. 
This is no new proposition and needs no discussion. Many 
men can do in three years more than the average man can 
in four. In many institutions, in most of those in the West, 
this privilege has been allowed for many years. If guarded 
from abuse, and if the possibility of mere cramming is ex- 
cluded, there can be no objection to it. In many institu- 
tions a man graduates whenever he has done the required 
w^ork, and the propriety of this needs no argument. 

But the average man cannot do the required work in less 
than four years. What shall we do for him? It is practi- 
cable to reduce the amount of work required for graduation. 
This would still leave the college course longer than it was 
twenty years ago, because so much more is now required 
for admission to college. 

I do not believe that this is the best solution. It is better, 
I believe, to bring the elements of professional knowledge 
and the beginning of advanced research into the course 
itself. It is better to break down the barrier between the 
college and the university, by letting the university dip 
dow^n into the college. For example, in making lawyers, 
the work in the foundations of law can be relegated to the 
college, as in making chemists we now teach elementary 
chemistry in the Freshman year. In training physicians, 
the elementary work, physiology, general anatomy, histology, 
and chemistry, should all be in the college course, and in 
making scientific men of any grade, the senior year is none 
too early for the beginnings of scientific research. I believe 



David Starr Jordan 65 

that the four years' college course offers a great advantage. 
It is now possible to offer the serious student, before graduat- 
ing, the crowning value of the college course — something 
of the method of research. It is likewise possible to offer 
the elements of professional training inside the college course, 
and not as an affair wholly separate. In favor of this arrange- 
ment, the following facts may be urged: 

It is an advantage to college training to relate it to life. 
The sooner a man knows what he is to do in life, and gets 
at it, the better. This being admitted, the fuller the prep- 
aration the better, provided the final goal is always kept in 
view. To make a first-rate surgeon, the scalpel should be in 
use from youth onward. It need not be used on the human 
body, but the methods of histology and anatomy should be 
learned early and never allowed to fall into disuse. To 
put an embryo physician through four years of classics and 
mathematics, and then to turn him suddenly into dissection 
and clinic, is to invite failure. He has learned nothing of 
research in his college course, his hand has grown clumsy 
and his power of observation is dulled. To be a good phy- 
sician, he should have turned his whole college course in 
that direction — not that he should have had less of litera- 
ture and the humanities, but that these should aid science, 
not displace it. 

A young man makes a better lawyer if he is in some degree 
a law student throughout his college course, for six or seven 
years, not merely for three at the end. Elementary equity is 
in no sense an advanced study. It has a natural place in the 
college curriculum, with just as much right as economics, or 
the history of philosophy, and to the ordinary college course 
the universities should regulate elementary law, physiology, 
histology, comparative anatomy, and all forms of science 



66 Recent Tendencies in College Education 

which are elementary and fundamental to professional 
research. When this is done, four years will be none too 
long for general training, and the professional departments 
will deal with men prepared to do serious work, men worthy 
of the advantages the best libraries and laboratories can have 
to offer. Then, if the time is to be shortened, the result 
can be reached by the higher demands of the professional 
schools. It is absurd to call the department of law a 
^^ graduate school'' when half its students are engaged with 
the a-b-c of equity, a subject as elementary as trigonom- 
etry or qualitative analysis. Let elementary law go with 
elementary chemistry and the advanced school can devote 
itself to advanced training, and a man who is to be a 
lawyer can think in terms of law throughout his college 
course. He will be a better lawyer for doing so, and his 
work being better related to life, he will be in every other 
respect a better scholar on account of it. 

Leaving out ill-equipped or temporary schools, the Ameri- 
can professional school of the future will have one or the 
other of two great purposes. The one is typified, perhaps, 
by the professional schools of Michigan. The professional 
school will take the profession as it is and raise it as a whole. 
So many men will be doctors, so many men will be lawyers 
in Michigan. Let us take them as we find them and make 
them just as good lawyers and doctors as we can. Let us 
not drive them away by requirements they cannot or will 
not meet, but adjust the work and conditions to the best 
they can meet, the best standards winning in the long run 
and carrying public opinion with them. 

The other ideal is perhaps t>^ified by Johns Hopkins 
University. Let the university medical school deal with 
the exceptional man of exceptional ability and exceptional 



David Starr Jordan 67 

training. Give him special advantages, send out a limited 
number of the best physicians possible, and raise the stand- 
ard of the profession by filling its ranks with the best the 
university can send. 

The one ideal or the other will be, consciously or not, 
before each professional school which strives to be really 
helpful. It is not for me to say which is the better. The 
one purpose naturally presents itself to state institutions, 
or to institutions dependent on appropriations or patronage. 
The other is more readily achieved by institutions of inde- 
pendent endowment. It is a matter of economy that all 
schools should not be alike in this regard. 

The high school course gives a certain breadth of culture. 
The high school of today is as good as the college of forty 
years ago, so far as studies go. It misses the fact of going 
aw^ay from home and of close relation with m.en of higher 
wisdom and riper experience than our high schools demand 
in their teachers. It takes a broader mental horizon to be 
a physician than merely to practice medicine, to be a law- 
yer than merely to practice law. Those who want the least 
education possible can get along with very little; they can 
omit the college. But for large-minded, widely competent 
men, men fit for great duties, not a moment of the college 
course can be spared. Whether to take a college education 
or not, depends on the man — what there is in him — and 
on the course of study. There is no magic in the name of 
college, and there is no gain in wrong subjects, work shirked, 
or in right subjects taken under wrong teachers. Studies, 
like other food, must be assimilated before they can help 
the system. 

The great indictment of the college is its waste of the 
student's time; prescribed studies taken unwillingly; irrel- 



68 Recent Tendencies in College Education 

evant studies taken to fill up; helpful studies taken under 
poor teachers; any kind of studies taken idly — all these 
have tended to discredit the college course. Four years 
is all too short for a liberal education, if every moment be 
utilized. Two years is all too long, if they are spent in 
idleness and dissipation, or if tainted by the spirit of indif- 
ference. 

The spirit of the college is more important than the time 
it takes. The college atmosphere should be a clean and 
wholesome one, full of impulses to action. It is good to 
breathe this air, and in doing so, it matters little whether 
one's studies be wholly professional, half professional, or 
directed towards ends of culture alone. 

In city colleges where the students live at home, traveling 
back and forth on street cars, a college atmosphere cannot 
be developed. In these institutions, as a rule, the college 
w^ork is perfunctory, its recitations being often regarded as 
a disagreeable interruption of social and athletic affairs. 
As a rule, higher education begins when a man leaves home 
to become part of a guild of scholars. The city college is 
merely a continued high school, and with both students and 
teachers there is a willingness to cut it as short as possible, 
so that the young men can ^^get down to business." In 
institutions of this t}pe, the professional school forms a sharp 
contrast to the college in its stronger requirements and more 
serious purpose. In other t}pes of college, it is the general 
student who does the best work. In m.any of them the 
professional departments are far inferior in tone and spirit 
to the general academic course. 

It becomes, then, a question as to the college itself, how 
long a student should stay in. If the academic require- 
ments are severe, just, and honest; if the idler, the butter- 



David Starr Jordan 69 

fly, the blockhead, and the parasite are promptly dropped 
from the rolls; if the spirit of plain living and high thinking 
rules in the college, the student should stay there as long as 
he can, and, if possible, take part of his professional work 
under its guidance. The nearer the teacher, the better the 
work. The value of teachers grows less as the square of their 
distance increases. If the college course is a secondary 
matter, with inferior teachers talking down to their students, 
studies prescribed because the faculty cares too little for 
the individual man to adapt its courses to his needs — an 
atmosphere of trifling or no atmosphere at all — the sooner 
the student gets into something real, the better. A good 
university may develop in a great city, a good college cannot, 
because students and teachers are all too far apart. 

In this matter the college degree is only an incident. It 
is the badge of admission to the roll of alumni, a certificate 
of good fellowship, which always means a little and may 
imply a great deal. But the degree is only one of the toys 
of our educational babyhood, as hoods and gowns represent 
educational bib and tucker. Don't go out of your way to 
take a degree. Don't miss it because you are in too great 
a hurry. For the highest professional success, you can afford 
to take your time. It takes a larger provision for a cruise 
to the Cape of Good Hope than for a run to the Isle of Dogs. 

The primitive American college was built strictly on 
English models. Its purpose was to breed clergymen and 
gentlemen, and to fix on these its badge of personal culture, 
raising them above the common mass of men. Till within 
the last thirty years the traditions of the English Tripos 
held undisputed sway. We need not go into details of the 
long years in which Latin, Greek, and mathematics, with 
a dash of outworn philosophy, constituted higher education 



70 Recent Tendencies in College Education 

in America. The value of the classical course lay largely 
in its continuity. Whoever learned Greek, the perfect 
language and the noble literature, gained something with 
which he would never willingly part. Even the weariness 
of Latin grammar and the intricacies of half-understood 
calculus have their value in the comradery of common 
suffering and common hope. The weakness of the classical 
course lay in its lack of relation to life. It had more charms 
for pedants than for men, and the men of science and the 
men of action turned away hungry from it. 

The growth of the American university came on by de- 
grees, by different steps, some broadening, some weaken- 
ing, by which the tyranny of the Tripos was broken, and 
the democracy of studies established with the democracy 
of men. 

It was something over thirty years ago when Herbert 
Spencer asked this great question, ^^What knowledge is of 
most worth?" To the schoolmen of England this came as a 
great shock, as it had never occurred to most of them that 
any knowledge had any value at all. Its function was to 
produce culture, which, in turn, gave social position. That 
there were positive values and relative values was new in 
their philosophy. Spencer w^ent on to show that those 
subjects had most value which most strengthened and 
enriched life; first, those needful to the person, then those 
of value in professional training, then in the rearing of the 
family, the duty as a citizen, and finally those fitting for 
esthetic enjoyment. For all these, except the last, the 
English universities made no preparation, and for all these 
purposes Spencer found the highest values in science, the 
accumulated, tested, arranged results of human experience. 
Spencer's essay assumed that there was some one best 



David Starr Jordan 71 

course of study — the best for every man. This is one of 
the greatest fallacies in education. Moreover, he took 
little account of the teacher, perhaps assuming with some 
other English writers that all teachers were equally in- 
efficient and that the difference between one and another 
may be regarded as negligible. 

It has been left for American experimenters in education 
to insist on the democracy of the intellect. The best sub- 
jects for any man to study are those best fitted for his own 
individual development, those which will help make the 
actual most of him and his life. Democracy of intellect 
does not mean equality of brains, still less indifference in 
regard to their quality. In means simply fair play in the 
schedule of studies. It means the development of fit courses 
of study, not traditional ones, of a ^Hailor-made'' curric- 
ulum for each man instead of the ^^hand-me-down'' article, 
misfitting all alike. 

In the time of James II, Richard Rumbold ^^ never could 
believe that God had created a few men already booted 
and spurred, with millions already saddled and bridled for 
these few to ride." In like fashion, Andrew Dickson White 
could never believe that God had created a taste for the 
niceties of grammar or even the appreciation of noble litera- 
ture, these few tastes to be met and trained while the vast 
body of other talents were to be left unaided and untouched, 
because of their traditional inferiority. In unison with 
President White, Ezra Cornell declared that he ^Svould 
found an institution where any person could find instruction 
in any study." In like spirit the Morrill Act was framed, 
bringing together all rays of various genius, the engineer 
and the psychologist, the student of literature and the 
student of exact science, "Greek-minded" men and tillers 



72 Recent Tendencies in College Education 

of the soil, each to do his own work in the spirit of equaHty 
before the law. Under the same roof each one gains by 
mutual association. The literary student gains in serious- 
ness and power, the engineer in refinement and appreciation. 
Like in character is the argument for coeducation, a condi- 
tion encouraged by this same Morrill Act. The men become 
more refined from association with noble women, the women 
more earnest from association with serious men. The men 
are more manly, the women more womanly in coeducation, 
a condition opposed alike to rowdyism and frivolity. 

In the same line we must count the influence of Mark 
Tappan, perhaps the first to conceive of a state university, 
existing solely for the good of the state, to do the work the 
state most needs, regardless of w^hat other institutions may 
do in other states. Agassiz in these same times insisted that 
advanced work is better than elementary, for its better 
disciplinary quality. He insisted that Harvard in his day 
was only ^'a respectable high school, where they taught 
the dregs of education." Thorough training in some one 
line he declared was the backbone of education. It w^as the 
base line by w^hich the real student w^as enabled to measure 
scholarship in others. 

In most of our colleges the attempt to widen the course 
of study by introducing desirable things preceded the dis- 
covery that general courses of study prearranged had no real 
value. We should learn that all prescribed w^ork is bad 
work unless it is prescribed by the nature of the subject. 
The student in electrical engineering takes to mathematics, 
because he knows that his future success with electricity 
depends on his mastery of mechanics and the calculus. In 
the same fashion, the student in medicine is willing to accept 
chemistry and physiology as prescribed studies. But a 



David Starr Jordan 73 

year in chemistry, or two years in higher mathematics, put 
in for the broadening of the mind or because the faculty 
decrees it, has no broadening effect. 

Work arbitrarily prescribed is always poorly done; it 
sets low standards, and works demoralization instead of 
training. There cannot be a greater educational farce than 
the required year of science in certain literary courses. The 
student picks out the easiest science, the easiest teacher, 
and the easiest way to avoid work, and the whole require- 
ment is a source of moral evil. Nothing could be farther 
from the scientific method than a course in science taken 
without the element of personal choice. 

The traditional courses of study were first broken up by 
the addition of short courses in one thing or another, sub- 
stituted for Latin or Greek, patchwork courses without 
point or continuity. These substitute courses were naturally 
regarded as inferior and for them very properly a new degree 
w^as devised, the degree of B.S. — Bachelor of Surfaces. 

That work which is required in the nature of things is 
taken seriously. Serious work sets the pace, exalts the 
teacher, inspires the man. The individual man is important 
enough to justify his teachers in taking the time and the 
effort to plan a special course for him. 

Through the movement towards the democracy of studies 
and constructive individualism, a new ideal is being reached 
in American universities, that of personal effectiveness. 
The ideal in England has always been that of personal 
culture; that of France, the achieving, through competitive 
examinations, of ready-made careers, the ^satisfaction of what 
Villari^ calls Impiegomania, the craze for appointment; that 

^ " A consequence of cheap higher education in Italy is the vast and 
ever increasing army of the educated unemployed (called spostati). Every 



74 Recent Tendencies in College Education 

of Germany, thoroughness of knowledge; that of America, 
the power to deal with men and conditions. Everywhere 
we find abundant evidence of the personal effectiveness of 
American scholars. Not abstract thought, not life-long 
investigation of minute data, not separation from men of 
lower fortune, but the power to bring about results is the 
characteristic of the American scholar of today. 

From this point of view the progress of the American 
university is most satisfactory and most encouraging. The 
large tendencies are moving in the right direction. What 
shall we say of the smaller ones? ^ 

Not long ago, the subject of discussion in a thoughtful 
address was ''The Peril of the Small College." The small 
college has been the guardian of higher education in the 
past. It is most helpful in the present and we cannot afford 



year a large number of graduates in law, medicine, belles-lettres, and science 
are turned out into the world to enter professions in which there is no room 
for them. Their education has unfitted them for useful work, without 
enabling them to succeed in the liberal professions. Men who in England 
would go into business or emigrate to America or the colonies, in Italy 
become lawyers without clients, doctors without patients, journalists and 
litterateurs without readers, professors without pupils. Some succeed in 
getting a little work by under-selling abler men, thus lowering the already 
low professional incomes ; others lead idle and vicious lives for a time, and 
drift into Socialism and Anarchism in Northern Italy, or into the Mafia 
and the Camorra in the South. But a large number try to obtain that 
panacea for all ills — government employment. Impiegomania is a recog- 
nized disease in Italy, and a young man who can obtain an appointment in 
a Government ofiice, where he has little work and a salary of £50 or £60 
a year, thinks himself at the height of earthly bliss. Government employ- 
ment is the Holy Grail of three-quarters of the university graduates. The 
most miserably paid impiegato or the most unsuccessful professional man 
regards himself as superior to the most prosperous tradesman or skilled 
mechanic." — Villari, Village Life in Towjt and Country. 

It is not the cheapness of higher education which is here at fault, but its 
misdirection and the wrong motives ruhng in Italian society. 



David Starr Jordan 75 

to let it die. We understand that the large college becomes 
the university. Because it is rich, it attempts advanced 
work and work in many lines. It takes its opportunity, and 
an opportunity which the small college cannot grasp. Ad- 
vanced work costs money. A wide range of subjects, taught 
with men, libraries, and laboratories, is a costly matter, 
but by a variety of supply the demand is formed. The 
large college has many students, because it offers many 
opportunities. Because large opportunities bring influence 
and students and gifts, there is a tendency to exaggerate 
them. It is easy to feel that the facilities we offer are greater 
than is really the case. We are led to boast, because only 
boasting seems to catch the public eye. 

The peril of the small college is the peril of all colleges, 
the temptation of advertising. All boasting is self-cheapen- 
ing. The peril of the small college is that in its effort to 
become large it shall cease to be sound. The small college 
can do good elementary work in several lines. It can do 
good advanced work in a very few. If it keeps its perspec- 
tive, if it does only what it can do well, and does not pre- 
tend that bad work is good work, or that the work beyond 
its reach is not worth doing, it is in no danger. The small 
college may become either a junior college or high-grade 
preparatory school, sending its men elsewhere for the flower 
of their college education, or else it must become a small 
university running narrowly on a few lines, but attending 
to these with devotion and persistence. Either of these is 
an honorable condition. For the first of these the small 
college has a great advantage. It can come close to its 
students; it can "know its men by name." The value of 
a teacher is enhanced as he becomes more accessible. The 
work of the freshman and sophomore years in many a great 



76 Recent Tendencies in College Education 

college is sadly inadequate, because its means are not fitted 
to its ends. In very few of our large colleges does the ele- 
mentary work receive the care its importance deserves. 

The great college can draw the best teachers away from 
the small colleges. In this regard the great college has 
an immense advantage. It has the best teachers, the best 
trained, the best fitted for the work of training. But in 
most cases the freshman never discovers this. There is no 
worse teaching done under the sun than in the lower classes 
of some of our most famous colleges. Cheap tutors, inex- 
perienced and underpaid, are set to lecture to classes far 
beyond their power to interest. We are saving our money 
for original research, careless of the fact that we fail to give 
the elementary training which makes research possible. 
Too often, indeed, research itself, the noblest of all univer- 
sity functions, is made an advertising fad. The demands of 
the university press have swollen the Hterature of science, 
but they have proved a doubtful aid to its quality. ^' Get 
something ready. Send it out. Show that we are doing 
something." All this never advanced science. It is through 
men born to research, trained to research, choicest product 
of nature and art, that science advances. 

Another effect of the advertising spirit is the cheapening 
of salaries. The smaller the salaries, the more departments 
we can support. It is the spirit of advertising that leads some 
institutions to tolerate a t}^e of athlete who comes as a 
student with none of the student's purpose. I am a firm 
believer in college athletics. I have done my part in them 
in college and out. I know that ^'the color of life is red,'' 
but the value of athletic games is lost when outside gladiators 
are hired to play them. No matter what the inducement, 
the athletic contest has no value except as the spontaneous 



David Starr Jordan 77 

effort of the college man. To coddle the athlete is to 
render him a professional. If an institution makes one 
rule for the ordinary student and another for the athlete, it 
is party to a fraud. Without some such concession, half 
the great football teams of today could not exist. I would 
rather see football disappear and the athletic fields closed 
for ten years for fumigation than to see our colleges help- 
less in the hands of athletic professionalism, as many of them 
are today. 

This is a minor matter in one sense, but it is pregnant with 
large dangers. Whatever the scholar does should be clean. 
What has the support of boards of scholars should be noble, 
helpful, and inspiring. For the evils of college athletics, 
the apathy of college faculties is solely responsible. The 
blame falls on us; let us rise to our duty. 

There is something wrong in our educational practice when 
a wealthy idler is allowed to take the name of student, on 
the sole condition that he and his grooms shall pass occa- 
sional examinations. There is no justification for the grant- 
ing of degrees on cheap terms, to be used in social decoration. 
It is said that the chief of the great coaching trust in one of 
our universities earns a salary larger than was ever paid to 
any honest teacher. His function is to take the man who 
has spent the term in idleness or dissipation, and by a few 
hours' ingenious coaching to enable him to Avrite a paper 
as good as that of a real student. The examinations thus 
passed are mere shams, and by the tolerance of the system 
the teaching force becomes responsible for it. No educa- 
tional reform of the day is more important than the revival 
of honesty in regard to credits and examinations, such a 
revival of honest methods as shall make coaching trusts 
impossible. 



78 Recent Tendencies in College Education 

The same methods which cure the aristocratic ills of 
idleness and cynicism are equally effective in the democratic 
vice of rowdyism. With high standards of work, set not at 
long intervals by formal examinations, but by the daily 
vigilance and devotion of real teachers, all these classes of 
mock students disappear. 

The football tramp vanishes before the work-test. The 
wealthy boy takes his proper place when honest, democratic 
brain effort is required of him. If he is not a student, he 
will no longer pretend to be one and ought not to be in 
college. The rowdy, the mucker, the hair-cutting, gate- 
lifting, cane-rushing imbecile is never a real student. He 
is a gamin masquerading in cap and gown. The requirement 
of scholarship brings him to terms. If we insist that our 
colleges shall not pretend to educate those who cannot or 
will not be educated, we shall have no trouble with the moral 
training of the students. 

Above all, in the West, where education is free, we should 
insist that free tuition means serious work, that education 
means opportunity, that the student should do his part, and 
that the degree of the university should not be the seal of 
academic approbation of four years of idleness, rowdyism, 
profligacy, or dissipation. 

Higher education, properly speaking, begins when a young 
man goes away from home to school. The best part of higher 
education is the development of the instincts of the gentle- 
man and the horizon of the scholar. To this end self-directed 
industry is one of the most effective agents. As the force 
of example is potent in education, a college should tolerate 
idleness and vice neither among its students nor among its 
teachers. 



THE NEW DEFINITION OF THE 
CULTIVATED MAN^ 

By CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT 

To produce the cultivated man, or at least the man capable 
of becoming cultivated in after-life, has long been supposed 
to be one of the fundamental objects of systematic and 
thorough education. The ideal of general cultivation has 
been one of the standards in education. It is often asked: 
Will the education which a given institution is supplying 
produce the cultivated man? Or, Can cultivation be the 
result of a given course of study? In such questions there 
is an implication that the education which does not produce 
the cultivated man is a failure, or has been misconceived, 
or misdirected. Now, if cultivation were an unchanging 
ideal, the steady use of the conception as a permanent test 
of educational processes might be justified; but if the culti- 
vated man of today is, or ought to be, a distinctly different 
creature from the cultivated man of a century ago, the ideal 
of cultivation cannot be appealed to as a standard without 
preliminary explanations and interpretations. It is the 
object of this paper to show that the idea of cultivation in 
the highly trained human being has undergone substantial 
changes during the last century. 

I ought to say at once that I propose to use the term 

^Reprinted from Present College Questions, by special permission of 
D. Appleton & Co. 



8o The New Definition of the Cultivated Man 

'^ cultivated man" in only its good sense — in Emerson's 
sense. In this paper, he is not to be a weak, critical, fastidi- 
ous creature, vain of a little exclusive information or of an 
uncommon knack in Latin verse or mathematical logic: 
he is to be a man of quick perceptions, broad sympathies, 
and wide affinities; responsive but independent; self-reliant 
but deferential; loving truth and candor, but also modera- 
tion and proportion; courageous but gentle; not finished, 
but perfecting. All authorities agree that true culture is not 
exclusive, sectarian, or partisan, but the very opposite; that 
it is not to be attained in solitude, but in society; and that 
the best atmosphere for culture is that of a school, university, 
academy, or church, where many pursue together the ideals 
of truth, righteousness, and love. 

Here some one may think: This process of cultivation is 
evidently a long, slow, artificial process; I prefer the genius, 
the man of native power or skill, the man whose judgment 
is sound and influence strong, though he cannot read or wTite 
— the born inventor, orator, or poet. So do we all. Men 
have always reverenced prodigious inborn gifts, and always 
w^ill. Indeed, barbarous men always say of the possessors 
of such gifts: These are not men; they are gods. But we 
teachers who carry on a system of popular education, which 
is by far the most complex and valuable invention of the 
nineteenth century, know that wx have to do, not with the 
highly gifted units, but with the millions who are more or 
less capable of being cultivated by the long, patient, artificial 
training called education. For us and our system the genius 
is no standard, but the cultivated man is. To his stature 
we and many of our pupils may in time attain. 

There are tw^o principal dift'erences between the present 
ideal of cultivation and that which prevailed at the begin- 



Charles William Eliot 8i 

ning of the nineteenth century. All thinkers agree that the 
horizon of the human intellect has widened wonderfully dur- 
ing the past hundred years, and that the scientific method 
of inquiry, which was known to but very few when the nine- 
teenth century began, has been the means of that widening. 
This method has become indispensable in all fields of inquiry, 
including psychology, philanthropy, and religion; and there- 
fore intimate acquaintance with it has become an indis- 
pensable element in culture. As Matthew Arnold pointed 
out more than a generation ago, educated mankind is gov- 
erned by two passions — one the passion for pure knowledge, 
the other the passion for being of service or doing good. 
Now, the passion for pure knowledge is to be gratified only 
through the scientific method of inquiry. In Arnold's 
phrases, the first step for every aspirant to culture is to 
endeavor to see things as they are, or ''to learn, in short, 
the will of God." The second step is to make that will 
prevail, each in his own sphere of action and influence. 
This recognition of science as pure knowledge, and of the 
scientific method as the universal method of inquiry, is the 
great addition made by the nineteenth century to the idea 
of culture. I need not say that within that century what we 
call science, pure and applied, has transformed the world 
as the scene of the human drama; and that it is this trans- 
formation which has compelled the recognition of natural 
science as a fundamental necessity in liberal education. 
The most convincing exponents and advocates of humanism 
now recognize that science is the ''paramount force of the 
modern as distinguished from the antique and the mediaeval 
spirit" [John Addington Symonds, Culture], and that "an 
interpretation of humanism with science, and of science with 
humanism, is the condition of the highest culture." 



82 The New Definition of the Cultivated Man 

A second modification of the earlier idea of cultivation 
was advocated by Ralph Waldo Emerson more than two 
generations ago. He taught that the acquisition of some 
form of manual skill and the practice of some form of manual 
labor were essential elements of culture. This idea has more 
and more become accepted in the systematic education of 
youth; and if we include athletic sports among the desir- 
able forms of manual skill and labor, we may say that during 
the last thirty years this element of excellence of body in 
the ideal of education has had a rapid, even an exaggerated, 
development. The idea of some sort of bodily excellence 
was, to be sure, not absent in the old conception of the 
cultivated man. The gentleman could ride well, dance 
gracefully, and fence with skill. But the modern conception 
of bodily skill as an element in cultivation is more com- 
prehensive, and includes that habitual contact with the 
external world which Emerson deemed essential to real 
culture. We have lately become convinced that accurate 
work with carpenter's tools, or lathe, or hammer and anvil, 
or violin, or piano, or pencil, or crayon, or cameFs-hair brush, 
trains well the same nerves and ganglia with which we do 
what is ordinarily called thinking. We have also become 
convinced that some intimate, sympathetic acquaintance 
with the natural objects of the earth and sky adds greatly 
to the happiness of life, and that this acquaintance should 
be begun in childhood and be developed all through adoles- 
cence and maturity. A brook, a hedgerow, or a garden is 
an inexhaustible teacher of wonder, reverence, and love. 
The scientists insist today on nature study for children; but 
we teachers ought long ago to have learned from the poets 
the value of this element in education. They are the best 
advocates of nature study. If any here are not convinced 



Charles William Eliot 83 

of its worth, let them go to Theocritus, Virgil, Wordsworth, 
Tennyson, or Lowell for the needed demonstration. Let 
them observe, too, that a great need of modern industrial 
society is intellectual pleasures, or pleasures which, like 
music, combine delightful sensations with the gratifications 
of observation, association, memory, and sympathy. The 
idea of culture has always included a quick and wide sym- 
pathy with men; it should hereafter include sympathy with 
nature, and particularly with its living forms — a sympathy 
based on some accurate observation of nature. The book- 
worm, the monk, the isolated student, has never been the 
type of the cultivated man. Society has seemed the natural 
setting for the cultivated person, man or woman; but the 
present conception of real culture contains not only a large 
development of this social element, but also an extension of 
interest and reverence to the animated creation and to those 
immense forces that set the earthly stage for man and all 
related beings. 

Let us now proceed to examine some of the changes in the 
idea of culture, or in the available means of culture, which 
the last hundred years have brought about. 

I. The moral sense of the modern world makes character 
a more important element than it used to be in the ideal of 
a cultivated man. Now character is formed, as Goethe 
said, in the ^'stream of the world" — not in stillness or 
isolation, but in the quick-flomng tides of the busy world, 
the world of nature and the world of mankind. At the 
end of the nineteenth century the world w^as wonderfully 
different from the world at the beginning of that eventful 
period; and, moreover, men's means of making acquaint- 
ance with the world were vastly ampler than they were a 
hundred years earlier. To the old idea of culture some 



84 The New Definition of the Cultivated Man 

knowledge of history was indispensable. Now, history is a 
representation of the stream of the world, or of some Httle 
portion of that stream, one hundred, five hundred, two 
thousand years ago. Acquaintance with some part of the 
present stream ought to be more formative of character, and 
more instructive as regards external nature and the nature 
of man, than any partial survey of the stream that was 
flowing centuries ago. We have, then, through the present 
means of reporting the stream of the world from day to day, 
material for culture such as no preceding generation of 
men has possessed. The cultivated man or w^oman must 
use the means which steam and electricity have provided 
for reporting the play of physical forces and of human voli- 
tions which make the world of today; for the world of 
today supphes in its immense variety a picture of all stages 
of human progress, from the stone age, through savagery, 
barbarism, and mediaevalism, to what we now call civiliza- 
tion. The rising generation should think hard, and feel 
keenly, just where the men and women who constitute the 
actual human world are thinking and feeling most today. 
The panorama of today's events is not an accurate or com- 
plete picture, for history will supply posterity with much 
evidence which is hidden from the eyes of contemporaries; 
but it is nevertheless an invaluable and a new means of 
developing good judgment, good feeling, and the passion for 
social ser\dce, or, in other words, of securing cultivation. 
But some one will say: The stream of the world is foul. 
True in part. The stream is, what it has been, a mixture of 
foulness and purity, of meanness and majesty; but it has 
nourished indi^ddual virtue and race ci\dlization. Litera- 
ture and history are a similar mixture, and yet are the tradi- 
tional means of culture. Are not the Greek tragedies means 



Charles William Eliot 85 

of culture? Yet they are full of incest, murder, and human 
sacriiices to lustful and revengeful gods. ,. 

II. A cultivated man should express himself by tongue 
or pen with some accuracy and elegance; therefore linguistic 
training has had great importance in the idea of cultivation. 
The conditions of the educational world have, however, 
changed so profoundly since the revival of learning in Italy 
that our inherited ideas concerning training in language and 
literature have required large modifications. In the year 
1400, it might have been said with truth that there was 
but one language of scholars, the Latin, and but two great 
literatures, the Hebrew and the Greek. Since that time, 
however, other great literatures have arisen, the Italian, 
Spanish, French, German, and above all, the English, which 
has become incomparably the most extensive and various 
and the noblest of literatures. Under these circumstances 
it is impossible to maintain that a knowledge of any par- 
ticular Uterature is indispensable to culture. Yet we cannot 
but feel that the cultivated man ought to possess a consider- 
able acquaintance with the literature of some great language, 
and the power to use the native language in a pure and 
interesting way. Thus, we are not sure that Robert Burns 
could be properly described as a cultivated man, moving poet 
though he was. We do not think of Abraham Lincoln 
as a cultivated man, master of English speech and writing 
though he was. These men do not correspond to the t}^e 
represented by the word ''cultivated," but belong in the class 
of geniuses. When we ask ourselves why a knowledge of 
literature seems indispensable to the ordinary idea of culti- 
vation, we find no answer except this — that in literature 
are portrayed all human passions, desires, and aspirations, 
and that acquaintance with these human feelings, and with 



86 The New Definition of the Cultivated Man 

the means of portraying them, seems to us essential to 
culture. These human qualities and powers are also the 
commonest ground of interesting human intercourse, and 
therefore literary knowledge exalts the quality and enhances 
the enjoyment of human intercourse. It is in conversation 
that cultivation tells as much as anywhere, and this rapid 
exchange of thoughts is by far the commonest manifesta- 
tion of its power. Combine the knowledge of literature 
with knowledge of the ''stream of the world" and you have 
united two large sources of the influence of the cultivated 
person. The linguistic and literary element in cultivation 
therefore abides, but has become vastly broader than formerly 
— so broad, indeed, that selection among its various fields 
is forced upon every educated youth. 

Hi. The next great element in cultivation to which I ask 
your attention is acquaintance with some part of the store 
of knowledge which humanity in its progress from barbarism 
has acquired and laid up. This is the prodigious store of 
recorded, rationalized, and systematized discoveries, experi- 
ences, and ideas. This is the store which v/e teachers try to 
pass on to the rising generation. The capacity to assimilate 
this store and improve it in each successive generation is 
the distinction of the human race over other animals. It 
is too vast for any man to master, though he had a hundred 
lives instead of one; and its growth in the nineteenth cen- 
tury was greater than in all the thirty preceding centuries 
put together. In the eighteenth century a diligent student 
wdth strong memory and quick powers of apprehension need 
not have despaired of mastering a large fraction of this store 
of knowledge. Long before the end of the nineteenth cen- 
tury such a task had become impossible. Culture, there- 
fore, can no longer imply a knowledge of everything — not 



Charles William Eliot 87 

even a little knowledge of everything. It must be content 
with general knowledge of some things, and a real mastery 
of some small portion of the human store. Here is a pro- 
found modification of the idea of cultivation which the 
nineteenth century has brought about. What portion or 
portions of the infinite human store are most proper to the 
cultivated man? The answer must be: Those which enable 
him, with his individual personal qualities, to deal best and 
sympathize most with nature and with other human beings. 
It is here that the passion for service must fuse with the 
passion for knowledge. It is natural to imagine that the 
young man who has acquainted himself with economics, 
the science of government, sociology, and the history of 
civilization in its motives, objects, and methods, has a better 
chance of fusing the passion for knowledge with the passion 
for doing good than the man whose passion for pure knowl- 
edge leads him to the study of chemical or physical phenom- 
ena, or of the habits and climatic distribution of plants or 
animals. Yet, so intricate are the relations of human 
beings to the animate and inanimate creation that it is 
impossible to foresee with what realms of nature intense 
human interests may prove to be identified. Thus the 
generation now on the stage has suddenly learned that some 
of the most sensitive and exquisite human interests, such 
as health or disease, and life or death for those we love, are 
bound up with the life-histories of parasites on the blood 
corpuscles or of certain varieties of mosquitoes and ticks. 
When the spectra of the sun, stars, and other lights began 
to be studied, there was not the slightest anticipation that 
a cure for one of the most horrible diseases to which man- 
kind is liable might be found in the X-rays. While, then, 
we can still see that certain subjects afford more obvious or 



88 The New Definition of the Cultivated Man 

frequent access to means of doing good and to fortunate 
intercourse with our fellows than other subjects, we have 
learned that there is no field of real knowledge which may 
not suddenly prove contributory in a high degree to human 
happiness and the progress of civilization, and therefore 
acceptable as a worthy element in the truest culture. 

IV. The only other element in cultivation which time 
will permit me to treat is the training of the constructive 
imagination. The imagination is the greatest of human 
powers, no matter in what field it works — in art or htera- 
ture, in mechanical invention, in science, government, com- 
merce, or rehgion; and the training of the imagination is, 
therefore, far the most important part of education. I use 
the term ^^constructive imagination" because that imphes 
the creation or building of a new thing. The sculptor, for 
example, imagines or conceives the perfect form of a child 
ten years of age. He has never seen such a thing, for a 
child perfect in form is never produced; he has only seen in 
different children the elements of perfection, here one ele- 
ment and there another. In his imagination he combines 
these elements of the perfect form, which he has only seen 
separated, and from this picture in his mind he carves the 
stone, and in the execution invariably loses his ideal — that 
is, falls short of it or fails to express it. Sir Joshua Reynolds 
points out that the painter can picture only what he has 
somewhere seen; but that the more he has seen and noted 
the surer he is to be original in his painting, because 
his imaginary combinations mil be original. Constructive 
imagination is the great power of the poet as well as of the 
artist; and the nineteenth century has convinced us that 
it is also the great power of the man of science, the investi- 
gator, and the natural philosopher. What gives every 



Charles William Eliot 89 

great naturalist or physicist his epoch-making results is 
precisely the imaginative power by which he deduces from 
masses of fact the guiding hypothesis or principle. 

The educated world needs to recognize the new varieties 
of constructive imagination. Dante gave painful years to 
picturing on many pages of his immortal comedy of hell, 
purgatory, and paradise the most horrible monsters and 
tortures, and the most loathsome and noisome abominations 
that his fervid imagination could concoct out of his own 
bitter experiences and the manners and customs of his cruel 
times. Sir Charles Lyell spent many laborious years in 
searching for and putting together the scattered evidences 
that the geologic processes by which the crust of the earth 
has been made ready for the use of man have been, in the 
main, not catastrophic, but gradual and gentle; and that 
the forces which have been in action through past ages are, 
for the most part, similar to those we may see today eroding 
hills, cutting canons, making placers, marshes, and meadows, 
and forming prairies and ocean floors. He first imagined, 
and then demonstrated, that the geologic agencies are not 
explosive and cataclysmal, but steady and patient. These 
two kinds of imagination — Dante's and Lyell's — are not 
comparable, but both are manifestations of great human 
power. Zola, in La Bete Humaine, contrives that ten persons, 
all connected with the railroad from Paris to Havre, shall 
be either murderers or murdered, or both, within eighteen 
months; and he adds two railroad slaughters criminally 
procured. The conditions of time and place are ingeniously 
imagined, and no detail is omitted which can heighten the 
effect of this homicidal fiction. Contrast this kind of con- 
structive imagination with the kind which conceived the 
great wells sunk in the solid rock below Niagara that con- 



90 The New Definition of the Cultivated Man 

tain the turbines, that drive the dynamos, that generate 
the electric force that turns thousands of wheels and lights 
thousands of lamps over thousands of square miles of adjoin- 
ing territory; or with the kind that conceives the sending of 
human thoughts across three thousand miles of stormy sea 
instantaneously, on nothing more substantial than ethereal 
waves. There is no crime, cruelty, or lust about these last 
two sorts of imagining. No lurid fire of hell or human pas- 
sion illumines their scenes. They are calm, accurate, just, 
and responsible ; and nothing but beneficence and increased 
human well-being results from them. There is going to be 
room in the hearts of twentieth-century men for a high 
admiration of these kinds of imagination, as well as for that 
of the poet, artist, or dramatist. 

Another kind of imagination deserves a moment's con- 
sideration — the receptive imagination which entertains 
and holds fast the visions which genius creates or the anal- 
ogies nature suggests. A young woman is absorbed for 
hours in conning the squalid scenes and situations through 
w^hich Thackeray portrays the malign motives and unclean 
soul of Becky Sharp. Another young woman watches for 
days the pairing, nesting, brooding, and foraging of two 
robins that have established home and family in the notch 
of a maple near her window. She notes the unselfish labors 
of the father and mother for each other and for their little 
ones, and weaves into the simple drama all sorts of protec- 
tive instincts and human affections. Here are tw^o employ- 
ments for the receptive imagination. Shall systematic 
education compel the first but make no room for the 
second? The increasing attention to nature study sug- 
gests the hope that the imaginative study of human ills 
and woes is not to be allowed to exclude the imaginative 



Charles William Eliot 91 

study of nature, and that both studies may count toward 
culture. 

It is one lesson of the nineteenth century, then, that in 
every field of human knowledge the constructive imagina- 
tion finds play — in literature, in history, in theology, in 
anthropology, and in the whole field of physical and biologi- 
cal research. That great century has taught us that, on the 
whole, the scientific imagination is quite as productive for 
human service as the literary or poetic imagination. The 
imagination of Darwin or Pasteur, for example, is as high 
and productive a form of imagination as that of Dante, or 
Goethe, or even Shakespeare, if we regard the human uses 
which result from the exercise of imaginative powers, and 
mean by human uses not merely meat and drink, clothes 
and shelter, but also the satisfaction of mental and spiritual 
needs. We must, therefore, allow in our contemplation of 
the cultivated man a large expansion of the fields in which 
the cultivated imagination may be exercised. We must 
extend our training of the imagination beyond literature 
and the fine arts, to history, philosophy, science, govern- 
ment, and sociology. We must recognize the prodigious 
variety of fruits of the imagination that the last century 
has given to our race. 

It results from this brief survey that the elements and 
means of cultivation are much more numerous than they 
used to be; so that it is not wise to say of any one acquisi- 
tion or faculty: With it cultivation becomes possible, with- 
out it, impossible. The one acquisition or faculty may be 
immense, and yet cultivation may not have been attained. 
Thus it is obvious that a man may have a wide acquaintance 
with music, and possess great musical skill and that wonder- 
ful imaginative power which conceives delicious melodies 



92 The New Definition of the Cultivated Man 

and harmonies for the deUght of mankind through centuries, 
and yet not be a cultivated man in the ordinary acceptation 
of the words. We have met artists who WTre rude and 
uncouth, yet possessed a high degree of technical skill and 
strong powers of imagination. We have seen philanthropists 
and statesmen whose minds have played on great causes 
and great affairs, and yet who lacked a correct use of their 
native language, and had no historical perspective or back- 
ground of historical knowledge. On the other hand, is there 
any single acquisition or faculty which is essential to culture, 
except indeed a reasonably accurate and refined use of the 
mother tongue? Again, though we can discern in different 
individuals different elements of the perfect type of culti- 
vated man, we seldom find combined in any human being 
all the elements of the type. Here, as in painting or sculp- 
ture, we make up our ideal from traits picked out from 
many imperfect individuals and put together. We must 
not, therefore, expect systematic education to produce mul- 
titudes of highly cultivated and symmetrically developed 
persons; the multitudinous product will always be imper- 
fect, just as there are no perfect trees, animals, flowers, or 
crystals. 

It has been my object to point out that our conception 
of the type of cultivated man has been greatly enlarged, and 
on the whole exalted, by observation of the experiences of 
mankind during the last hundred years. Let us as teachers 
accept no single element or kind of culture as the one essen- 
tial; let us remember that the best fruits of real culture 
are an open mind, broad sympathies, and respect for all 
the diverse achievements of the human intellect at what- 
ever stage of development they may actually be — the stage 
of fresh discovery, or bold exploration, or complete conquest. 



Charles William Eliot 93 

Let us remember that the moral elements of the new educa- 
tion are individual choice of studies and career among a great, 
new variety of studies and careers, early responsibihty 
accompanying this freedom of choice, love of truth, now that 
truth may be directly sought through rational inquiry, and 
an omnipresent sense of social obligation. These moral 
elements are so strong that the new forms of culture are 
likely to prove themselves quite as productive of morality, 
high-mindedness, and ideahsm as the old. 



TWO KINDS OF EDUCATION FOR 
ENGINEERS 1 

By JOHN BUTLER JOHNSON 

Education may be defined as a means of gradual emanci- 
pation from the thraldom of incompetence. Since incom- 
petence leads of necessity to failure, and since competence 
alone leads to certain success, in any line of human endeavor, 
and since the natural or uneducated man is but incompetence 
personified, it is of supreme importance that this thraldom, 
or this enslaved condition in which we are all born, should 
be removed in some way. While unaided individual effort 
has worked, and will continue to work, marvels in rare 
instances in our so-called self-made men, these recognized 
exceptions acknowledge the rule that mankind in general 
must be aided in acquiring this complete mastery over the 
latent powers of head, heart, and hand. These formal aids 
in this process of emancipation are found in the grades of 
schools and colleges with which the children of this country 
are now blessed beyond those of almost any other country 
or time. The boys or girls who fail to embrace these eman- 
cipating opportunities to the fullest extent practicable, are 
thereby consenting to degrees of incompetence and their 
corresponding and resulting failures in life, which they have 

^ First given as an Address before the College of Engineering of the Uni- 
versity of Wisconsin, and reprinted here by special permission of Mrs. Phoebe 
E. Johnson. 



John Butler Johnson 95 

had it in their power to prevent. This they will ultimately 
discover to their chagrin and even grief, when it is too late 
to regain the lost opportunities. 

There are, however, two general classes of competency 
which I wish to discuss today, and which are generated in 
the schools. These are, competency to serve, and competency 
to appreciate and enjoy. 

By competency to serve is meant that ability to perform 
one's due proportion of the world's work which brings to 
society a common benefit, and w^hich makes of this world 
a continually better home for the race, and which tends to 
fit the race for that immortal life in which it puts its trust. 

By competency to appreciate and enjoy is meant that 
ability to understand, to appropriate, and to assimilate those 
great personal achievements of the past and present in the 
fields of the true, the beautiful, and the good, which brings 
into our lives a kind of peace, and joy, and gratitude which 
can be found in no other way. 

It is true that all kinds of elementary education contrib- 
ute alike to both of these ends, but in the so-called higher 
education it is too common to choose between them rather 
than to include them both. Since it is only service which 
the world is willing to pay for, it is only those competent 
and willing to serve a public or private utility who are com- 
pensated in a financial w^ay. It is the education which brings 
a competency to serve, therefore, which is often called the 
utilitarian, and sometimes spoken of contemptuously as 
the bread-and-butter education. On the other hand, the 
education which gives a competency to appreciate and to 
enjoy is commonly spoken of as a cultural education. As 
to which kind of education is the higher and nobler, if they 
must be contrasted, it all depends on the point of view. If 



96 Two Kinds of Education for Engineers 

personal pleasure and happiness is the chief end and aim 
of life, then for that class of persons who have no disposition 
to serve, the cultural education is the more worthy of admira- 
tion and selection (conditioned of course on the bodily com- 
forts being so far provided for as to make all financial 
compensations of no object to the individual). If, however, 
service to others is the most worthy purpose in life, and if 
in addition such service brings the greatest happiness, then 
that education which develops the ability to serve, in some 
capacity, should be regarded as the higher and more worthy. 
This kind of education has the further advantage that the 
money consideration it brings makes its possessor a self- 
supporting member of society instead of a drone or parasite, 
which those people must be who cannot serve. I never 
could see the force of the statement that ^Hhey also serve 
who only stand and wait.'' It is possible they may serve 
their own pleasures, but if this is all, the statement should 
be so qualified. 

The higher education which leads to a life of service has 
been known as a professional education, as law% medicine, 
the ministry, teaching, and the like. These have long been 
known as the learned professions. A learned profession 
may be defined as a vocation in w^hich scholarly accom- 
plishments are used in the ser\dce of society or of other 
individuals for a valuable consideration. Under such a 
definition every new vocation in which a very consid- 
erable amount of scholarship is required for its success- 
ful prosecution, and which is placed in the service of 
others, must be held as a learned profession. And as 
engineering now demands fully as great an amount of 
learning, or scholarship, as any other, it has already taken 
a high rank among these professions, although as a learned 



John Butler Johnson 97 

profession it is scarcely half a century old. Engineering 
differs from all other learned professions, however, in this, 
that its learning has to do only with the inanimate world, 
the world of dead matter and force. The materials, the laws, 
and the forces of nature, and scarcely to any extent its life, 
is the peculiar field of the engineer. Not only is engineering 
pretty thoroughly divorced from life in general, but even 
with that society of which the engineer is a part his profes- 
sional life has little in common. His profession is so new it 
practically has no past, either of history or of literature, 
which merits his consideration, must less his laborious study. 
Neither do the ordinary social or political problems enter in 
any way into his sphere of operations. Natural law, dead 
matter, and lifeless force make up his working world, and in 
these he lives and moves and has his professional being. 
Professionally regarded, what to him is the history of his own 
or of other races? What have the languages and the litera- 
tures of the world of value to him? What interest has he 
in domestic or foreign politics, or in the various social and 
religious problems of the day? In short, what interest is 
there for him in what we now commonly include in the term 
"the humanities"? It must be confessed that in a profes- 
sional way they have little or none. Except perhaps two 
other modern languages by which he obtains access to the 
current progress in applied science, he has practically no 
professional interest in any of these things. His structures 
are made no safer or more economical; his prime-movers 
are no more powerful or efficient; his electrical wonders 
no more occult or useful; his tools no more ingenious or 
effective because of a knowledge of all these humanistic 
affairs. As a mere server of society, therefore, an engineer 
is about as good a tool without all this cultural knowledge 



gS Two Kinds of Education for Engineers 

as with it. But as a citizen, as a husband and father, as a 
companion, and more than all, as one's own constant, per- 
petual, unavoidable personality, the taking into one's life 
of a large knowledge of the life and thought of the world, 
both past and present, is a very important matter indeed, 
and of these two kinds of education, as they affect the life- 
w^ork, the professional success, and the personal happiness 
of the engineer, I will speak more in detail. 

I am here using the term, engineer, as including that large 
class of modern industrial workers who make the new appli- 
cation of science to the needs of modern life their peculiar 
business and profession. A man of this class may also be 
called an applied scientist. Evidently he must have a 
large acquaintance with such practical sciences as surveying, 
physics, chemistry, geology, metallurgy, electricity, applied 
mechanics, kinematics, machine design, power generation 
and transmission, structural designing, land and water trans- 
portation, etc. And as a common solvent of all the problems 
arising in these various subjects he must have acquired an 
extended knowledge of mathematics, without which he would 
be like a sailor with neither compass nor rudder. To the 
engineer mathematics is a tool of investigation, a means to 
an end, and not the end itself. The same may be said of 
his physics, his chemistry, and of all his other scientific studies. 
They are all to be made tributary to the solution of problems 
w^hich may arise in his professional career. His entire 
technical education, in fact, is presumably of the useful 
character, and acquired for specific useful ends. Similarly 
he needs a free and correct use of his mother tongue, that 
he may express himself clearly and forcibly both in speech 
and composition, and an ability to read both French and 
German, that he may read the current technical literature 



John Butler Johnson 99 

in the two other languages which are most fruitful in new 
and original technical matter. 

It is quite true that the mental development, the growth 
of one's mental powers and the command over the same, 
which comes incidentally in the acquisition of all this tech- 
nical knowledge, is of far more value than the knowledge 
itself, and hence great care is given in all good technical 
schools to the mental processes of the students, and to a 
thorough and logical method of presentation and of acquisi- 
tion. In other words, while you are under our instruction 
it is much more important that you should think consecu- 
tively, rationally, and logically, than that your conclusions 
should be numerically correct. But as soon as you leave the 
school the exact reverse will hold. Your employer is not 
concerned with your mental development, or with your 
mental processes, so long as your results are correct, and 
hence we must pay some attention to numerical accuracy 
in the school, especially in the upper classes. We must 
remember, however, that the mind of the engineer is pri- 
marily a workshop and not a warehouse or lumber-room of 
mere information. Your facts are better stored in your 
library. Room there is not so valuable as it is in the mind, 
and the information, furthermore, is better preserved. 
Memory is as poor a reliance to the engineer as to the ac- 
countant. Both alike should consult their books when thev 

ml 

want the exact facts. Knowledge alone is not power. The 
ability to use knowledge is a latent power, and the actual 
use of it is power. Instead of storing your minds with use- 
ful knowledge, therefore, I will say to you, store your minds 
with useful tools, and with a knowledge only of how to use 
such tools. Then your minds will become mental workshops, 
well fitted for turning out products of untold value to your 



loo Two Kinds of Education for Engineers 

day and generation. Everything you acquire in your course 
in this college, therefore, you should look upon as mental 
tools with which you are equipping yourselves for your 
future careers. It may well be that some of your work will 
be useful rather for the sharpening of your wits and for the 
development of mental grasp, just as gymnastic exercise is 
of use only in developing your physical system. In this 
case it has served as a tool of development instead of one for 
subsequent use. Because all your knowledge here gained 
is to serve you as tools it must be acquired quantitatively 
rather than qualitatively. First, last, and all the time, 
you are required to know not simply how, but how much, 
how far, how fast, to what extent, at what cost, with what 
certainty, and with what factor of safety. In the cultural 
education, where one is learning only to appreciate and to 
enjoy, it may satisfy the average mind to know that coal 
burning under a boiler generates steam which, entering a 
cylinder, moves a piston which turns the engine, and stop 
with that. But the engineer must know how many heat 
units there are in a pound of coal burned, how many of these 
are generated in the furnace, how many of them pass into 
the water, how much steam is consumed by the engine per 
horse-power per hour, and finally how much effective work 
is done by the engine per pound of coal fed to the furnace. 
Merely qualitative knowledge leads to the grossest errors 
of judgment and is of that kind of little learning which is a 
dangerous thing. At my summer home I have a hydraulic 
ram set below a dam, for furnishing a water supply. Nearby 
is an old abandoned water-power grist mill. A man and his 
wife were looking at the ram last summer and the lady 
was overheard to ask what it was for. The man looked 
about, saw the idle water-wheel of the old mill, and ventured 



John Butler Johnson loi 

the opinion that it must be used to run the mill! He knew 
a hydrauUc ram when he saw it and he knew it was used to 
generate power, and that power would run a mill. Ergo, 
a hydraulic ram will run a mill. This is on a par with 
thousands of similar errors of judgment where one's knowl- 
edge is qualitative only. All engineering problems are 
purely quantitative from beginning to end, and so are all 
other problems, in fact, whether material, or moral, or 
financial, or commercial, or social, or political, or religious. 
All judgments passed on such problems, therefore, must be 
quantitative judgments. How poorly prepared to pass 
such judgments are those whose knowledge is qualitative 
only! Success in all fields depends very largely on the 
accuracy of one's judgment in foreseeing events, and in 
engineering it depends w^holly on such accuracy. An engi- 
neer must see all around his problem, and take account of 
every contingency which can happen in the ordinary course 
of events. When all such contingencies have been foreseen 
and provided against, then the unexpected cannot happen, 
as everything has been foreseen. It is customary to say, 
**The unexpected always happens." This of course is 
untrue. What is meant is, *^It is only the . imexpected 
which happens," for the very good reason that what has 
been anticipated has been provided against. 

In order that knowledge may be used as a tool in investi- 
gations and in the solution of problems, it must be so used 
constantly during the period of its acquisition. Hence 
the large amount of drawing-room, field, laboratory, and 
shop practice introduced into our engineering courses. We 
try to make theory and practice go hand in hand. In fact 
we teach that theory is only a generalized practice. From 
the necessary facts, observed in special experiments or in 



I02 Two Khids of Education for Engineers 

actual practice, and which cover a sufficiently wide range 
of conditions, general principles are deduced from which 
effects of given like causes can be foreseen or derived, for 
new cases arising in practice. This is like saying, in survey- 
ing, that with a true and accurate hind-sight an equally 
true and accurate forward course can be run. Nearly all 
engineering knowledge, outside the pure mathematics, is of 
this experimental or empirical character, and we generally 
know who made the experiments, under what conditions, 
over what range of var}dng conditions, how accordant his 
results were, and hence what weight can be given to his 
conclusions. When we can find in our engineering litera- 
ture no sufficiently accurate data, or none exactly covering 
the case in hand, we must set to work to make a set of experi- 
ments which will cover the given conditions, so as to obtain 
numerical factors, or possibly new laws, which will serve to 
make our calculations prove true in the completed struc- 
ture or scheme. The ability to plan and carry out such cru- 
cial tests and experiments is one of the most important 
objects of an engineering college training, and we give our 
students a large amount of such laboratory practice. In 
all such work it is the absolute truth we are seeking, and 
hence any guessing at data, or falsifying of records, or ''doc- 
toring" of the computations is of the nature of a profes- 
sional crime. Any copying of records from other observers, 
when students are supposed to make their own observa- 
tions, is both a fraud upon themselves as well as dishonest 
to their instructor, and indicates a disposition of mind which 
has nothing in common with that of the engineer, who is 
alwavs and evervwhere a truth-seeker and a truth-tester. 
The sooner such a person leaves the college of engineering 
the better for him and the engineering profession. Men 



John Butler Johnson 103 

in other professions may blunder or play false with more 
or less impunity. Thus the lawyer may advocate a bad 
cause without losing caste; a physican may blunder at will, 
but his mistakes are soon buried out of sight; a minister 
may advocate what he no longer believes himself, and feel 
that the cause justifies his course; but the mistakes of the 
engineer are quick to find him out and to proclaim aloud 
his incompetence. He is the one professional man who is 
obliged to be right, and for whom sophistry and self-deception 
are a fatal poison. But the engineer must be more than 
honest: he must be able to discern the truth. With him 
an honest motive is no justification. He must not only 
believe he is right: he must know that he is right. And it 
is one of the greatest elements of satisfaction in this pro- 
fession, that it is commonly possible to secure in advance 
this almost absolute certainty of results. We deal with 
fixed laws and forces, and only so far as the materials used 
may be faulty, or of unknown character, or as contingencies 
could not be foreseen or anticipated, does a necessary igno- 
rance enter into the problem. 

It must not be understood, however, that with all of both 
theory and practice we are able to give our students in their 
four- or five-year course, they will be full-fledged engineers 
when they leave us. They ought to be excellent material 
out of which, with a few years' actual practice, they would 
become engineers of the first order. Just as a young phy- 
sician must have experience with actual patients, and as a 
young lawyer must have actual experience in the courts, so 
must an engineer have experience with real problems before 
he can rightfully lay claim to the title of engineer. And 
in seeking this professional practice they must not be too 
choice. As a rule the higher up one begins the sooner his 



I04 Two Kinds of Education for Engineers 

promotion stops, and the lower down he begins the higher 
will he ultimately climb. The man at the top should know 
in a practical way all the work over which he is called upon 
to preside, and this means beginning at the bottom. Too 
many of our graduates refuse to do this, and so they stop in 
a middle position, instead of coming into the management 
of the business, which position is reserved for a man who 
knows it all from the bottom up. Please understand that 
no position is too menial in the learning of a business. But 
as your college training has enabled you to learn a new thing 
rapidly, you should rapidly master these minor details of 
any business, and in a few years you should be far ahead of 
the ordinary apprentice who went to work from the grammar 
or from the high school. The great opportunity for the 
engineer of the future is in the direction and management 
of our various manufacturing industries. We are about to 
become the world's workshop, and as competition grows 
sharper and as greater economies become necessary, the 
technically trained man will become an absolute necessity 
in the leading positions in all our industrial works. These 
are positions hitherto held by men who have grown up with 
the business, but without technical training. They are 
being rapidly supplanted by technical men, who, however, 
must serve their apprenticeship in the business from the 
bottom up. With this combination of theory and practice, 
and with the American genius for invention, and with our 
superb spirit of initiative and of independence, we are already 
setting a pace industrially which no other nation can keep, 
and which will soon leave all others hopelessly behind. 

In the foregoing description of the technical education 
and work of the engineer, the engineer himself has been 
considered as a kind of human tool to be used in the interest 



Joh7i Butler Johnson 105 

of society. His service to society alone has been in contem- 
plation. But as the engineer has also a personaHty which 
is capable of appreciation and enjoyment of the best this 
world has produced in the way of hterature and art; as he 
is to be a citizen and a man of family; and, moreover, since 
he has a conscious self with which he must always commune 
and from which he cannot escape, it is well worth his while 
to see to it that this self, this husband and father, this citizen 
and neighbor, is something more than a tool to be worked 
in other men's interests, and that his mind shall contain a 
library, a parlor, and a drawing-room, as well as a workshop. 
And yet how many engineers' minds are all shop and out of 
which only shop- talk can be drawn! Such men are little 
more than animated tools, worked in the interest of society. 
They are liable to be something of a bore to their families 
and friends, almost a cipher in the social and religious life 
of the community, and a weariness to the flesh to their more 
liberal-minded professional brethren. Their lives are one 
continuous grind, which has for them doubtless a certain 
grim satisfaction, but which is monotonous and tedious in 
comparison with what they might have been. Even when 
valued by the low standard of money-making they are not 
nearly so likely to secure lucrative incomes as they would 
be with a greater breadth of information and worldly interest. 
They are likely to stop in snug professional berths which 
they find ready-made for them, under some sort of fixed 
administration, and maintain through life a subordinate 
relation to directing heads who with a tithe of their technical 
ability are yet able, with their worldly knowledge, their 
breadth of interests, and their fellowship with men, to 
dictate to these narrower technical subordinates, and to fix 
for them their fields of operation. 



io6 Two Kinds of Education for Engineers 

In order, therefore, that the technical man, who in material 
things knows what to do and how to do it, may be able to 
get the thing done and to direct the doing of it, he must be 
an engineer of men and of capital as well as of the materials 
and forces of nature. In other words, he must cultivate 
human interests, human learning, human associations, and 
avail himself of every opportunity to further these personal 
and business relations. If he can make of himself a good 
business man, or as good a manager of men as he usually 
makes of himself in the field of engineering he has chosen, 
there is no place too great, and no salary too high for him 
to aspire to. Of such men are our greatest railroad presi- 
dents and general managers, and the directors of our largest 
industrial establishments. While most of this kind of knowl- 
edge must also be acquired in actual practice, yet some of 
it can best be obtained in college. I shall continue to urge 
upon all young men who can afford it to take either the 
combined six-year college and engineering course, described 
in our catalogue, or the five-year course in the college of 
engineering, taking as extra studies many things now taught 
in our school of commerce. The one crying weakness of 
our engineering graduates is ignorance of the business, the 
social, and the political world, and of human interests in 
general. They have little knowledge in common with the 
graduates of our literary colleges, and hence often find 
little pleasure in such associations. They become clannish, 
run mostly with men of their class, take little interest in the 
commercial or business departments of the establishments 
with which they are connected, and so become more and 
more fixed in their inanimate world of matter and force. 
I beseech you, therefore, while yet students, to try to broaden 
your interests, extend your horizons now into other fields, 



John Butler Johnson 107 

Wen but for a bird's-eye view, and profit, so far as possible, 
by the atmosphere of universal knowledge which you can 
breathe here through the entire period of your college course. 
Try to find a chum who is in another department; go to 
literary societies; haunt the library; attend the meetings 
of the Science Club; and in every way possible, with a 
peep here and a word there, improve to the utmost these 
marvellous opportunities which will never come to you again. 
Think not of tasks; call no assignments by such a name. 
Call them opportunities, and cultivate a hunger and thirst 
for all humanistic knowledge outside your particular world 
of dead matter, for you will never again have such an oppor- 
tunity, and you will be ahvays thankful that you made good 
use of this, your one chance in a lifetime. 

For your own personal happiness, and that of your im- 
mediate associates, secure in some way, either in college or 
after leaving the same, an acquaintance with the world's 
best literature, with the leading facts of history, and with 
the biographies of many of the greatest men in pure and 
applied science, as well as of statesmen and leaders in many 
fields. With this knowledge of great men, great thoughts, 
and great deeds, will come that lively interest in men and 
affairs which is held by educated men generally, and which 
will put you on an even footing with them in your daily 
intercourse. This kind of knowledge, also, elevates and 
sweetens the intellectual life, leads to the formation of 
lofty ideals, helps one to a command of good Enghsh, and 
in a hundred ways refines, and inspires to high and noble 
endeavor. This is the cultural education leading to appre- 
ciation and enjoyment man is assumed to possess. 

Think not, however, that I depreciate the peculiar work 
of the engineering college. It is by this kind of education 



io8 Two Kinds of Education for Engineers 

alone that America has already become supreme in nearly 
all lines of material advancement. I am only anxious that 
the men who have made these things possible shall reap 
their full share of the benefits. 

In conclusion, let me congratulate you on having selected 
courses of study which will bring you into the most intimate 
relations with the world's work of your generation. All 
life today is one endless round of scientific applications of 
means to ends, but such applications are still in their infancy. 
A decade now sees more material progress than a century 
did in the past. Not to be scientifically trained in these 
matters is equivalent today to a practical exclusion from 
all part and share in the industrial world. The entire 
direction of the world's industry and commerce is to be in 
your hands. You are also charged with making the innumer- 
able new discoveries and inventions which will come in your 
generation and almost wholly through men of your class. 
The day of the inventor, ignorant of science and of nature's 
laws, has gone by. The mere mechanical contrivances have 
been pretty well exhausted. Henceforth profitable inven- 
tion must include the use or embodiment of scientific prin- 
ciples with which the untrained artisan is unacquainted. 
More and more will invention be but the scientific applica- 
tion of means to ends, and this is what we teach in the 
engineering schools. Already our patent office is much 
puzzled to distinguish between engineering and invention. 
Since engineering proper consists in the solution of new prob- 
lems in the material world, and invention is likewise the 
discovery of new ways of doing things, they cover the same 
field. But an invention is patentable, w^hile an engineering 
solution is not. Invention is supposed in law to be an in- 
born faculty by which new truth is conceived by no definable 



John Butler Johnson 109 

(way of approach. If it had not been reached by this par- 
ticular individual it is assumed that it might never have been 
known. An engineering solution is supposed, and rightly, 
to have been reached by logical processes, through known 
laws of matter, and force, and motion, so that another engi- 
neer, given the same problem, would probably have reached 
the same or an equivalent result. And this is not patentable. 
Already a very large proportion of the patents issued could 
be nullified on this ground if the attorneys only knew enough 
to make their case. More and more, therefore, are the men 
of your class to be charged with the responsibility and to be 
credited with the honor of the world's progress, and more 
and more is the world's work to be placed under your direc- 
tion. The world will be remade by every succeeding genera- 
tion, and all by the technically educated class. These are 
your responsibilities and your honors. The tasks are great 
and great will be your rewards. That you may fitly prepare 
yourself for them is the hope and trust of your teachers in 
this college of engineering. 

I will close this address by quoting Professor Huxley's 
definition of a liberal education. Says Huxley, '^That 
man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so 
trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his 
will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as 
a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, 
cold, logic-engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and 
in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be 
turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well 
as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with 
a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature 
and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted 
ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained 



no Two Kinds of Education for Engineers 

to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender 
conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of 
Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others 
as himself. Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had 
a liberal education; for he is, as completely as a man can 
be, in harmony wdth Nature. He wdll make the best of her, 
and she of him. They will get on together rarely; she as 
his ever-beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her con- 
scious self, her minister and interpreter." 



A POISONOUS PHRASE ' 

By president WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE 

Bowdoin College 

In warfare we have ceased poisoning wells, and, if Dr. 
Wiley has his way, we shall not much longer poison food. 
Yet we still allow phrases to pass current among us which 
are more deadly than saccharine and copper sulphate, 
malaria and typhoid fever. For a whole unconscious philos- 
ophy of life may be wrapped up in a phrase; as in the case 
cited in Dean Briggs' Girls and Education of the man whose 
salutation was not, ^^How do you do?'' but, ^'How do you 
stand it?'' 

Sometimes these phrases are wholesome and therapeutic. 
In the rich soil of student conversation, however, weeds 
grow more profusely and rankly than flowers and vegetables. 
About a decade ago there sprang up a noxious weed, re- 
sponsible for much loafing among the well-to-do — ^'C is 
a gentleman's grade." President Lowell, soon after his 
inauguration, dealt that phrase its death-blow. A student 
whom he asked how he was getting on replied, ^^ Pretty well; 
I'm getting gentleman's grade." ^^Oh," said President 
Lowell, ^^you are getting A or E. A gentleman either does 
his best, or doesn't pretend to do anything." 

A phrase just now thrusting itself into academic use sets 

^ Reprinted from The Outlook of May i8, 19 12, by special permission of 
the author and the pubHshers. 



112 A Poisonous Phrase 

the ideal one notch lower than the discredited ^^gentleman's 
grade." It is the phrase, ^'Get by." 

I had often heard the phrase from both undergraduates 
and students in professional schools; but I never felt its 
full force until I heard its passionate denunciation by a 
business man with whom I was playing golf. We were 
talking about a certain young man whom he had recently 
met, and whom he had asked how he was getting on. ^^I 
am hoping to get by," was the reply. ^'^ Hoping to get 
by!'" exclaimed my friend, who, by the way, has a passion 
for perfection, whether it be in golf or a bond issue; ^^' hop- 
ing to get by! ' If I have a case where I am right, but it 
requires exhaustive knowledge and skillful interpretation to 
make the judge and jury see it, do you suppose I would 
employ a man who was 'hoping to get by' ?" 

The phrase contains as much moral poison as a two-word 
phrase can hold. It carries the implication that the course 
of study, or the examination, and time and effort spent in 
preparation for it, are evils; and that the only good is a 
vaguely defined state of existence, unrelated to present 
effort, which the lapse of time will bring us after these evils, 
with as little effort as possible, have been endured and sur- 
vived. It is a new form of the weakling's old device of 
wishing time and the opportunities it brings away. 

And young men, if courtesy forbids them to say as much 
to their fellows, must think, every time they hear the poi- 
sonous phrase, that it is the mark of a coward. 



INAUGURAL ADDRESS ^ 

By president ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 

Amherst College 



What do our teachers believe to be the aim of college 
instruction? Wherever their opinions and convictions find 
expression there is one contention which is always in the 
foreground, namely, that to be liberal a college must be 
essentially intellectual. It is a place, the teachers tell us, 
in which a boy, forgetting all things else, may set forth on the 
enterprise of learning. It is a time when a young man may 
come to awareness of the thinking of his people, may per- 
ceive what knowledge is and has been and is to be. What- 
ever light-hearted undergraduates may say, whatever the 
opinions of solicitous parents, of ambitious friends, of em- 
ployers in search of workmen, of leaders in church or state 
or business — whatever may be the beliefs and desires and 
demands of outsiders — the teacher within the college, 
knowing his mission as no one else can know it, proclaims 
that mission to be the leading of his pupil into the life intel- 
lectual. The college is primarily not a place of the body, 
nor of the feelings, nor even of the will; it is, first of all, a 
place of the mind. 

^ Printed by special permission of President Meiklejohn. 



114 Inaugural Address 



II 



Against this intellectual interpretation of the college our 
teachers find two sets of hostile forces constantly at work. 
Outside the walls there are the practical demands of a busy 
commercial and social scheme; within the college there are 
the trivial and sentimental and irrational misunderstandings 
of its own friends. Upon each of these our college teachers 
are wont to descend as Samson upon the Philistines, and 
when they have had their will, there is little left for another 
to accomplish. 

As against the immediate practical demands from with- 
out, the issue is clear and decisive. College teachers know 
that the world must have trained workmen, skilled opera- 
tives, clever buyers and sellers, efficient directors, resource- 
ful manufacturers, able lawyers, ministers, physicians, and 
teachers. But it is equally true that in order to do its own 
work, the liberal college must leave the special and technical 
training for these trades and professions to be done in other 
schools and by other methods. In a word, the liberal college 
does not pretend to give all the kinds of teaching which a 
young man of college age may profitable receive; it does not 
even claim to give all the kinds of intellectual training which 
are worth giving. It is committed to intellectual training 
of the liberal type, whatever that may mean, and to that 
mission it must be faithful. One may safely say, then, 
on behalf of our college teachers, that their instruction is 
intended to be radically different from that given in the 
technical school or even in the professional school. Both 
of these institutions are practical in a sense which the 
college, as an intellectual institution, is not. In the techni- 
cal school the pupil is taught how to do some one of the 



Alexander Meiklejohn 115 

mechanical operations which contribute to human welfare. 
He is trained to print, to weave, to farm, to build; and for 
the most part he is trained to do these things by practice 
rather than by theory. His possession when he leaves the 
school is not a stock of ideas, of scientific principles, but a 
measure of skill, a collection of rules of thumb. His primary 
function as a tradesman is not to understand but to do, and 
in doing what is needed he is following directions which have 
first been thought out by others and are now practiced by 
him. The technical school intends to furnish training which, 
in the sense in which we use the term, is not intellectual 
but practical. 

In a corresponding way the work of the professional 
school differs from that of the liberal college. In the teach- 
ing of engineering, medicine, or law we are or may be beyond 
the realm of mere skill and within the realm of ideas and 
principles. But the selection and the relating of these ideas 
is dominated by an immediate practical interest which cuts 
them off from the intellectual point of view of the scholar. 
If an undergraduate should take away from his studies of 
chemistry, biology, and psychology only those parts which 
have immediate practical application in the field of medicine, 
the college teachers would feel that they had failed to give 
the boy the kind of instruction demanded of a college. It 
is not their purpose to furnish applied knowledge in this 
sense. They are not willing to cut up their sciences into 
segments and to allow the student to select those segments 
which may be of service in the practice of an art or a pro- 
fession. In one way or another the teacher feels a kinship 
with the scientist and the scholar which forbids him to sub- 
mit to this domination of his instruction by the demands 
of an immediate practical interest. Whatever it may mean. 



ii6 Inaugural Address 

he intends to hold the intellectual point of view and to keep 
his students with him if he can. In response, then, to 
demands for technical and professional training, our college 
teachers tell us that such training may be obtained in other 
schools; it is not to be had in a college of liberal culture. 

In the conflict with the forces within the college our 
teachers find themselves fighting essentially the same battle 
as against the foes without. In a hundred different ways 
the friends of the college — students, graduates, trustees, 
and even colleagues — seem to them so to misunderstand 
its mission as to minimize or to falsify its intellectual ideals. 
The cohege is a good place for making friends; it gives 
excellent experience in getting on with men; it has excep- 
tional advantages as an athletic club ; it is a relatively safe 
place for a boy when he first leaves home; on the w^hole it 
may improve a student's manners; it gives acquaintance 
with lofty ideals of character, preaches the doctrine of 
social service, exalts the virtues and duties of citizenship. 
All these conceptions seem to the teacher to hide or to 
obscure the fact that the college is fundamentally a place 
of the mind, a time for thinking, an opportunity for knowing. 
And perhaps in proportion to their own loftiness of purpose 
and motive they are the more dangerous as tending all 
the more powerfully to replace or to nullify the underlying 
principle upon which they all depend. Here again when 
misconception clears away, one can have no doubt that the 
battle of the teacher is a righteous one. It is well that a 
boy should have four good years of athletic sport, playing 
his own games and watching the games of his fellows; it 
is well that his manners should be improved; it is worth 
while to make good friends; it is very desirable to develop 
the power of understanding and working with other men; it 



Alexander Meiklejohn 117 

is surely good to grow in strength and purity of character, 
in devotion to the interests of society, in readiness to meet 
the obligations and opportunities of citizenship. If any 
one of these be lacking from the fruits of a college course 
we may well complain of the harvest. And yet is it not 
true that by sheer pressure of these, by the driving and pull- 
ing of the social forces within and without the college, the 
mind of the student is constantly torn from its chief con- 
cern? Do not our social and practical interests distract 
our boys from the intellectual achievements which should 
dominate their imagination and command their zeal? I 
believe that one may take it as the deliberate judgment of 
the teachers of our colleges today that the function of the 
college is constantly misunderstood, and that it is subjected 
to demands which, however friendly in intent, are yet de- 
structive of its intellectual efficiency and success. 

Ill 

How then shall we justify the faith of the teacher? What 
reason can we give for our exaltation of intellectual training 
and activity? To this question two answers are possible. 
First, knowledge and thinking are good in themselves. 
Secondly, they help us in the attainment of other values in 
life which without them would be impossible. Both these 
answers may be given and are given by college teachers. 
Within them must be found whatever can be said by way . f 
explanation and justification of the work of the liberal 
college. 

The first answer receives just now far less of recognition 
than it can rightly claim. When the man of the world is 
told that a boy is to be trained in thinking just because of 
the joys and satisfactions of thinking itself, just in order 



ii8 Inaugural Address 

that he may go on thinking as long as he lives, the man of 
the world has been heard to scoff and to ridicule the idle 
dreaming of scholarly men. But if thinking is not a good 
thing in itself, if intellectual activity is not worth while for 
its own sake, will the man of the world tell us w^hat is? 
There are those among us w^ho find so much satisfaction in 
the countless trivial and vulgar amusements of a crude 
people that they have no time for the joys of the mind. 
There are those who are so closely shut up within a little 
round of petty pleasures that they have never dreamed of 
the fun of reading and conversing and investigating and 
reflecting. And of these one can only say that the differ- 
ence is one of taste, and that their tastes seem to be rela- 
tively dull and stupid. Surely it is one function of the 
liberal college to save boys from that stupidity, to give them 
an appetite for the pleasures of thinking, to make them 
sensitive to the joys of appreciation and understanding, to 
show them how sweet and captivating and w^holesome are 
the games of the mind. At the time when the play element 
is still dominant it is worth while to acquaint boys with the 
sport of facing and solving problems. Apart from some of 
the experiences of friendship and sympathy, I doubt if there 
are any human interests so permanently satisfying, so fine 
and splendid in themselves, as are those of intellectual ac- 
tivity. To give our boys that zest, that delight in things 
intellectual, to give them an appreciation of a kind of life 
which is well worth living, to make them men of intellectual 
culture — that certainly is one part of the work of any 
liberal college. 

On the other hand, the creation of culture as so defined 
can never constitute the full achievement of the college. 
It is essential to av/aken the impulses of inquiry, of experi- 



Alexander Meiklejohn 119 

ment, of investigation, of reflection, the instinctive cravings 
of the mind. But no Hberal college can be content with 
this. The impulse to thinking must be questioned and 
rationalized as must every other instinctive response. It is 
well to think, but what shall we think about? Are there 
any lines of investigation and reflection more valuable than 
others, and if so, how is their value to be tested? Or again, 
if the impulse for thinking comes into conflict with other 
desires and cravings, how is the opposition to be solved? 
It has sometimes been suggested that our man of intellectual 
culture may be found like Nero fiddling with words while 
all the world about him is aflame. And the point of the 
suggestion is not that fiddling is a bad and worthless pastime, 
but rather that it is inopportune on such an occasion, that 
the man who does it is out of touch with his situation, that 
his fiddling does not fit his facts. In a word, men know with 
regard to thinking, as with regard to every other content of 
human experience, that it cannot be valued merely in terms 
of itself. It must be measured in terms of its relation to 
other contents and to human experience as a whole. Think- 
ing is good in itself — but what does it cost of other things, 
and what does it bring of other values? Place it amid all 
the varied contents of our individual and social experience, 
measure it in terms of what it implies, fix it by means of its 
relations, and then you will know its worth not simply in 
itself but in that deeper sense which comes when human 
desires are rationalized and human lives are known in their 
entirety, as well as they can be known by those who are 
engaged in living them. 

In this consideration we find the second answer of the 
teacher to the demand for justification of the work of the 
college. Knowledge is good, he tells us, not only in itself, 



I20 Inaugural Address 

but in its enrichment and enhancement of the other values 
of our experience. In the deepest and fullest sense of the 
words, knowledge pays. This statement rests upon the classi- 
fication of human actions into two groups, those of the 
instinctive type and those of the intellectual t}^e. By far 
the greater part of our human acts are carried on without 
any clear idea of what we are going to do or how we are 
going to do it. For the most part our responses to our 
situations are the immediate responses of feeling, of per- 
ception, of custom, of tradition. But slowly and painfully, 
as the mind has developed, action after action has been 
translated from the feeling to the ideational type; in wider 
and wider fields men have become aware of their own modes 
of action, and more and more they have come to under- 
standing, to knowledge of themselves and of their needs. 
And the principle underlying all our educational procedure is 
that, on the whole, actions become more successful as they 
pass from the sphere of feeling to that of understanding. 
Our educational belief is that in the long run if men know 
w^hat they are going to do and how they are going to do it, 
and what is the nature of the situation with which they are 
dealing, their response to that situation will be better ad- 
justed and more beneficial than are the responses of the 
feeling type in like situations. 

It is all too obvious that there are limits to the validity 
of this principle. If men are to investigate, to consider, to 
decide, then action must be delayed and we must pay the 
penalty of waiting. If men are to endeavor to understand 
and know their situations, then we must be prepared to see 
them make mistakes in their thinking, lose their certainty 
of touch, wander oft' into pitfalls and illusions and fallacies 
of thought, and in consequence secure for the time results 



Alexander Meiklejohn 121 

far lower in value than those of the instinctive response 
which they seek to replace. The delays and mistakes and 
uncertainties of our thinking are a heavy price to pay, but 
it is the conviction of the teacher that the price is as nothing 
when compared with the goods w^hich it buys. You may 
point out to him the loss when old methods of procedure 
give way before the criticism of understanding, you may 
remind him of the pain and suffering when old habits of 
thought and action are replaced, you may reprove him for 
all the blunders of the past; but in spite of it all he knows 
and you know that in human lives taken separately and in 
human life as a whole men's greatest lack is the lack of 
understanding, their greatest hope to know themselves and 
the world in which they live. 

Within the limits of this general educational principle the 
place of the liberal college may easily be fixed. In the 
technical school pupils are prepared for a specific work and 
are kept for the most part on the plane of perceptual action, 
doing work which others understand. In the professional 
school, students are properly within the realm of ideas and 
principles, but they are still limited to a specific human 
interest with which alone their understanding is concerned. 
But the college is called liberal as against both of these 
because the instruction is dominated by no special interest, 
is limited to no single human task, but is intended to take 
human activity as a whole, to understand human endeavors 
not in their isolation but in their relations to one another 
and to the total experience w^hich we call the life of our 
people. And just as we beheve that the building of ships 
has become more successful as men have come to a knowledge 
of the principles involved in their construction; just as the 
practice of medicine has become more successful as we have 



122 Inaugural Address 

come to a knowledge of the human body, of the conditions 
within it and the influences without; — just so the teacher 
in the liberal college believes that life as a total enterprise, 
life as it presents itself to each one of us in his career as an 
individual — human living — will be more successful in so 
far as men come to understand it and to know it as they 
attempt to carry it on. To give boys an intellectual grasp 
on human experience — this it seems to me is the teacher's 
conception of the chief function of the liberal college. 

May I call attention to the fact that this second answer 
of the teacher defines the aim of the college a^ avowedly and 
frankly practical. Knowledge is to be sought chiefly for 
the sake of its contribution to the other activities of human 
living. But on the other hand, it is as definitely declared 
that in method the college is fully and unreservedly intellec- 
tual. If we can see that these two demands are not in con- 
flict but that they stand together in the harmonious relation 
of means and ends, of instrument and achievement, of method 
and result, we may escape many a needless conflict and keep 
our educational policy in singleness of aim and action. To 
do this we must show that the college is intellectual, not as 
opposed to practical interests and purposes, but as opposed 
to unpractical and unwise methods of work. The issue is 
not between practical and intellectual aims, but between 
the immediate and the remote aim, between the hasty and 
the measured procedure, between the demand for results at 
once and the willingness to wait for the best results. The 
intellectual road to success is longer and more roundabout 
than any other, but they who are strong and willing for the 
climbing are brought to higher levels of achievement than 
they could possibly have attained had they gone straight 
forward in the pathway of quick returns. If this were not 



Alexander Meiklejohn 123 

true the liberal college would have no proper place in our 
life at all. In so far as it is true the college has a right to 
claim the best of our young men to give them its preparation 
for the living they are to do. 

And now, finally, . . . may I suggest two matters of 
policy which seem to me to follow from the definition of 
education which we have taken. The first concerns the con- 
tent of the college course; the second has to do with the 
method of its presentation to the undergraduate. 

We have said that the system of free election is natural 
for those to whom knowledge is simply a number of separate 
departments. It is equally true that just in so far as knowl- 
edge attains unity, just so far as the relations of the various 
departments are perceived, freedom of election by the student 
must be limited. For it at once appears that on the one side 
there are vast ranges of information w^hich have virtually no 
significance for the purposes of a liberal education, while on 
the other hand there are certain elements so fundamental 
and vital that without any one of them a liberal education 
is impossible. 

I should like to indicate certain parts of human knowledge 
which seem to me so essential that no principle of election 
should ever be allowed to drive them out of the course of 
any college student. 

First, a student should become acquainted with the 
fundamental motives and purposes and beliefs which, clearly 
or unclearly recognized, underlie all human experience and 
bind it together. He must perceive the moral strivings, 

^ With President Meiklejohn's consent, section IV and two or three other 
brief passages have been omitted. 



124 Inaugural Address 

the intellectual endeavors, the esthetic experiences of his 
race, and closely linked with these, determining and de- 
termined by them, the beliefs about the world which have 
appeared in our systems of rehgion. To investigate this 
field, to bring it to such clearness of formulation as may be 
possible, is the task of philosophy — an essential element in 
any liberal education. Secondly, as in human living, our 
motives, purposes, and beliefs have found expression in 
institutions — those concerted modes of procedure by which 
we work together; — a student should be made acquainted 
with these. He should see and appreciate what is intended, 
what accomplished, and what left undone by such institu- 
tions as property, the courts, the family, the church, the 
mill. To know these as contributing and failing to contrib- 
ute to human welfare is the work of our social or humanistic 
sciences, into which a boy must go on his way through the 
liberal college. Thirdly, in order to understand the motives 
and the institutions of human life one must know the condi- 
tions which surround it, the stage on which the game is 
played. To give this information is the business of astron- 
omy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, and other descrip- 
tive sciences. These a boy must know, so far as they are 
significant and relevant to his purpose. Fourthly, as all 
three of these factors — the motives, the institutions, the 
natural processes — have sprung from the past and have 
come to be what they are by change upon change in the 
process of time, the student of human life must try to learn 
the sequence of events from which the present has come. 
The development of hmnan thought and attitude, the de- 
velopment of human institutions, the development of the 
world and of the beings about us — all these must be known, 
as throwing light upon present problems, present instru- 



Alexander Meiklejohn 125 

mentalities, present opportunities in the life of human 
endeavor. And in addition to these four studies which 
render human experience in terms of abstract ideas, a liberal 
education must take account of those concrete representa- 
tions of life which are given in the arts, and especially in 
the art of literature. It is well that a boy should be ac- 
quainted with his world not simply as expressed by the 
principles of knowledge but also as depicted by the artist 
with all the vividness and definiteness which are possible in 
the portrayal of individual beings in individual relationships. 
These five elements, then, a young man must take from a 
college of liberal training — the contributions of philosophy, 
of humanistic science, of natural science, of history, and of 
literature. So far as knowledge is concerned, these at least 
he should have, welded together in some kind of interpreta- 
tion of his own experience and of the world in which he lives. 

My second suggestion is that our college curriculum 
should be so arranged and our instruction so devised that 
its vital connection with the living of men should be obvious 
even to an undergraduate. A little while ago I heard one 
of the most prominent citizens of this country speaking of 
his college days, and he said, "I remember so vividly those 
few occasions on which the professor would put aside the 
books and talk like a real man about real things." Oh, the 
bitterness of those words to the teacher! Our books are 
not dealing with the real things, and for the most part we 
are not real men either, but just old fogies and bookworms. 
And to be perfectly frank about the whole matter, I believe 
that in large measure our pupils are indifferent to their 
studies simply because they do not see that these are im- 
portant. 

Now if we really have a vital course of study to present, 



126 Inaugural Address 

I believe that this difficulty can in a large measure be over- 
come. It is possible to make a Freshman realize the need of 
translating his experience from the forms of feeling to those 
of ideas. He can and he ought to be shown that now, his 
days of mere tutelage being over, it is time for him to face 
the problems of his people, to begin to think about those 
problems for himself, to learn what other men have learned 
and thought before him, in a word, to get himself ready to 
take his place among those w^ho are responsible for the 
guidance of our common life by ideas and principles and 
purposes. If this could be done, I think we should get from 
the reality-loving American boy something like an intellectual 
enthusiasm, somethihg of the spirit that comes when he 
plays a game that seems to him really worth playing. But 
I do not believe that this result can be achieved without a 
radical reversal of the arrangement of the college curriculum. 
I should like to see every Freshman at once plunged into the 
problems of philosophy, into the difficulties and perplexities 
about our institutions, into the scientific accounts of the 
world, especially as they bear on human life, into the por- 
trayals of human experience which are given by the masters 
of literature. If this were done by proper teaching, it seems 
to me the boy's college course would at once take on signifi- 
cance for him; he would understand what he is about; and 
though he would be a sadly puzzled boy at the end of the 
first year, he would still have before him three good years 
of study, of investigation, of reflection, and of discipleship, 
in which to achieve, so far as may be, the task to which he 
has been set. Let him once feel the problems of the present, 
and his historical studies wdll become significant; let him 
know what other men have discovered and thought about 
his problems, and he will be ready to deal with them himself. 



A lexander Meiklejohn 127 

But in any case, the whole college course will be unified and 
dominated by a single interest, a single purpose — that of 
so understanding human life as to be ready and equipped 
for the practice of it. And this would mean for the college, 
not another seeking of the way of quick returns, but rather 
an escape from aimless wanderings in the mere by-paths of 
knowledge, a resolute climbing on the high road to a unified 
grasp upon human experience. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION ^ 

Inaugural Address 

By president JOHN GRIER HIBBEN 

Princeton University 

In- entering formally upon the duties of the high office of 
president of Princeton University, I wish to present in my 
inaugural address the essential principles of our philosophy 
of education. We believe that the chief end of an education 
is the making of a man. It is the process of developing a 
power within which enables the human being to dominate 
the instincts and habits of his animal nature, assert himself 
as a free personality, and direct his life according to the light 
of reason. While he is a part of the natural world, man 
belongs also to the world of mind and of spirit. The partic- 
ular function of education is to give him the power of free- 
dom and to make him sensible of the duties and worthy of 
the privileges of a person in the midst of a universe of things. 

Personality, however, is not mechanically formed from 
without, but must be evoked from within. The appeal of 
the teacher, therefore, is constantly directed to the inner 
spirit of the student, that spirit of life which informs the 
man and puts him into possession of his powers. The 
forces which find play in the activities of the mind are like 
the architectonic principle which is at work in the inner 
nature of a plant, fashioning it into the form of grace and 

^Reprinted from the North American Review by special permission. 



John Grier Hibben 129 

beauty. Thus, with the emancipation of a free spirit at the 
sources of his being, the man within begins to develop both 
in power and in promise. 

It is of the very nature of education, however, that it 
does not result in a complete and finished product, but rather 
in a progressive process. There is nothing final about it. 
Its achievements always mark new beginnings. It is the 
power of an endless life. To say that a man is educated 
signifies that he has finished merely the preliminary stages 
of a continuous and progressive development. Education, 
therefore, must always be defined in terms of life, of growth, 
of progress. Its peculiar function is the conservation of 
those great human forces which make for the advancement 
of knowledge and the civilization of the world. We hear 
much today of the conservation of our national resources, 
our forests, the treasures of our mines, and the vast material 
wealth of our land. But w^hile we are emphasizing the neces- 
sity of a national economy we should not overlook the fact 
that the task of conserving and of developing the resources 
of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual power in our nation 
is the one supreme task. To conserve these powers, to cause 
them to develop and to prevail, to deliver free spirits from 
the bondage of ignorance and of material impulse, from the 
bondage of authority, of tradition, of public opinion, of 
passing fashion, and of prejudice, and to direct these liber- 
ated himian forces to the highest ends, that is the art of 
education. 

There is a common phrase, ^Ho receive an education," 
against which I would most emphatically protest. No one 
receives an education any more than he receives health or 
strength or life. It is the fruit of a firm and intelligent will. 
It is gained only by active effort, continuous and determined. 



130 The PhilosopJiy of Education 

An education is won by work; and the labors to be under- 
taken and the end to be attained may all be summed up in 
the command, Be a person. This is a command which is not 
merely the work of the teacher, but is essentially an inner 
compulsion possessing the solemn authority of self-legisla- 
tion. It is the determination to be something more than a 
creature of circumstance; it is the purpose to realize in the 
full measure of one's possibilities the power and the dignity 
of humanity. While plant and animal develop according 
to the power which they may possess of adapting themselves 
to their environment, it is the distinctive characteristic of 
man that he progresses through his ability to adapt his en- 
vironment to himself, and thus he determines the w^orld in 
which he lives. 

As freedom is the distinctive mark of a vigorous person- 
ality, all the processes of education must be directed to 
secure this essential end. Therefore, the ideal university 
education may be described as consisting of two phases — 
a phase in which every effort is directed to the attainment of 
freedom, and, secondly, a progressive phase of development 
in which the freedom gained in the earlier stages finds for 
itself varied pursuits and pleasures in the fields of knowledge. 

Hence it would seem essential that in the early years of 
one's university experience those studies should be pursued 
which are peculiarly conducive to the discipline and training 
of the mind, and eventually to the evolution of a self- 
determining and self-realizing wall. They deserve the name 
of liberal studies so far as they may tend to free the mind 
from the natural and artificial obstacles to its progressive 
development. 

One who is to maintain the health and growth of his 
intellectual life must come surely at some later period in 



John Grier Ilibben 131 

his development to delight in the tasks of the intellect. To 
. rejoice in the labors of the mind is not a prevailing charac- 
teristic of the natural man. As Aristotle has put it, ''All 
men naturally desire knowledge, but not all men desire the 
labor of learning." It often happens, however, in intel- 
lectual discipline, as in the development of moral virility, 
that a course of action which is done for a time under the 
stress of a sense of obligation and as a grievous duty, be- 
comes after a time a pleasure and a joy. Just as it is possible 
to grow into an enthusiasm for that which is right and 
honorable and of good report, so also it is possible by the 
discipline of one's intellectual powers to develop an enthusi- 
asm for the activities and pursuits of the mind. 

The practical problem, therefore, for the teacher, and 
particularly for a faculty of teachers, is to choose that body 
of studies which will best produce a spirit of devotion to the 
cause of knowledge and of joy in its service. Any satisfac- 
tory solution of this problem must rest upon the basal 
principle that true intellectual freedom is gained only through 
discipline. If there is to be intellectual power in the world 
it must be the power of a free spirit; and the power of a free 
spirit in turn can arise only out of a spirit of docility. To 
this doctrine, however, there are many who would enter a 
most emphatic dissent. They very stoutly insist that there 
should be no body of required studies whatsoever in a uni- 
versity, but that each student should follow his own free 
choice in selecting the particular subjects he may be pleased 
to pursue, and that such initial exercise of freedom is itself 
the best training for the wise uses of freedom in general. 
It is a very serious question indeed, whether the freedom of 
an ignorant and undisciplined mind may not come to defeat 
its own ends and purposes. 



132 The Philosophy of Education 

In Princeton we have very positive convictions on this 
point. We believe that the teaching body of a university 
should select a consistent group of required studies for the 
express purpose of developing in the student to the highest 
degree of efficiency the free powers of his intellectual life. 
We believe that it is absolutely necessary to have a certain 
schooling in preparation for the responsibilities of freedom; 
and that the hit-and-miss choice of an immature mind in 
new and strange surroundings, the blind groping for the 
truth by the process of trial and error, form a poor propae- 
deutic to the serious tasks of free investigation, of original 
thought, and of practical efficiency. We believe, moreover, 
that the best preparation for the freedom of the life of reason 
is that group of studies whose very nature tends to the 
training of the powers of the mind, developing in a man 
both capability and resource, and at the same time giving 
him a knowledge of himself and of the world in which he 
lives. 

Such studies are humanistic so far as they give a man a 
knowledge of the human setting of his life and create within 
his being a universal and sympathetic interest in humanity. 
They put him in possession of the race experience so that in 
his own mind he may hold the treasures of the world. There- 
fore, he m.ust be so led in the way of knowledge that he will 
come to know something of the human w^orld in which he 
lives, something also of the world of the past whose achieve- 
ments are his heritage, something of the form and spirit of 
its classical languages and literature, something of its history, 
customs, manners, morals, and institutions — in a word, he 
must know the thought of the world which possesses universal 
meaning and universal significance. There are, indeed, 
certain fundamental ideas which we may securely reckon 



John Grier Hibben 133 

with as constant factors in the equation of Hfe. I do not 
for a moment beHeve that the whole world of knowledge 
is composed of shifting and variable elements, so that 
we are constrained to acknowledge that whatever is true 
today may be false tomorrow. On the contrary, I would 
urge with all the emphasis of my deepest conviction that 
there is a body of universal truths, independent of age 
and of race, which vitally concern the ultimate values of 
life and which determine the possibilities of human develop- 
ment. Such truths the scholar must command if he in 
any sense is to command the world in which he lives. 

Not only the human world, but also the world of nature, 
must be a part of this general body of knowledge. In these 
first stages of education the study of science should form a 
very central and essential part of this prescribed course of 
study. Pure science is a liberal study; it belongs truly to 
the humanities, for it not merely gives knowledge of facts; 
it does more; it is a training in habits of precision, in accuracy 
of observation, in closely articulated modes of reasoning, in 
devices of experimentation, and in an appreciation of the 
valid grounds of proof and the logical basis of correct generali- 
zation. A study of scientific method, and of the history of 
scientific attainment, is in itself a course in inductive logic 
which tends not merely to fill the mind with items of informa- 
tion, but to expand it as well by an increased demand upon 
its powers of judgment and of inference. Princeton has 
been at times misunderstood as regards her attitude to 
science, and upon this occasion particularly I wish to state 
distinctly and emphatically, and in words which give no 
uncertain sound, that we regard the study of science as 
essential to a liberal education. So firmly grounded is this 
conviction that we require every candidate for the Bachelor's 



134 ^/^^ Philosophy of Education 

degree to pursue some one course at least in science. Prince- 
ton, which has the distinction of being the first college in 
America to introduce the teaching of chemistry in its curricu- 
lum; Princeton, which has been the home of Henry, of 
Guyot, and of Young, hardly needs to defend her old-time 
and continued interest in scientific discovery and scientific 
attainment. 

Within this same group of studies also there should be 
some provision for a training in the accurate and facile 
mode of giving expression to knowledge. The ability to 
put thought into appropriate and adequate form essentially 
characterizes a free spirit in the world of mind. To see, to 
think, to feel, and to remain dumb withal — is any bondage 
more intolerable? Certainly the educated man should be 
able to understand his own language with some appreciation 
of its power and beauty, be able- also to speak it as to the 
manor born, and not as a barbarian, and to express himself 
by the written word in such a manner as to reveal and not 
to obscure his thought and feeling. He alone can give life 
to knowledge who has acquired the art of communicating 
it to others. 

At this early stage there should be also some instruction 
in the beginnings of logic and psychology, at least to the 
extent of leading the student to understand the workings of 
his ow^n mind and the law^s which govern the processes of 
reason. In such a course there must emerge some com- 
prehension of the philosophical methods employed in various 
fields of investigation, of the relation of universal laws to 
facts, and of the nature of those central correlating and 
constructive ideas which in every sphere of thought and in 
every complex situation give a key to the solution of diflScult 
and perplexing problems. It is no little gain in the uses of 



John Grier Hibben 135 

knowledge to appreciate the significance of universal con- 
cepts and to grasp the import of that great logical idea that 
there may be a unity in variety and an identity in difference. 
In my own experience in the teaching of philosophy I have 
come to the firm conviction that it is of incalculable advan- 
tage to the ordinary student to know something of the 
nature and the range of the main philosophical problems, 
for they are indeed the problems of life which will inevitably 
confront him in his own thinking. If in these preliminary 
discussions at the threshold of philosophy the student can 
begin to develop for himself some interpretation of life as a 
whole he has gained immeasurably in the possession of 
ideas which will tend to unify his thought and ground his 
conviction through all the wide extent of his experience. 

Such is a brief description of the body of studies which 
should engage the first years of a student in his university 
career. At a time when he himself is learning to put his 
own mind in order he is unconsciously reinforced in his 
efforts if he finds himself daily engaged w^ith a consistent 
group of studies which themselves form a system. A sys- 
tematic mind does not develop naturally out of a miscellany 
of intellectual interests and activities. The idea of system 
and of systematic organization and of the logical correlation 
of essential parts within a consistent and comprehensive 
whole should characterize any body of required studies 
which is capable of justifying itself. Familiarity with a 
logical group of studies is itself an unconscious schooling 
in logic. 

After this early period of required studies, the liberty 
which is born of discipline can be wisely encouraged to 
manifest itself in the free choice of study for the remaining 
years of the university course. It is in accordance with the 



136 The Philosophy of Education 

Princeton program that this freedom of choice is granted to 
every student at the beginning of the second half of his 
undergraduate course — at the opening of his Junior year; 
only the choice is not allowed to lose itself in a maze of 
imrelated subjects. Here again we believe that there rests 
upon the teaching body a peculiar obhgation to prevent an 
unintelligent and indiscriminate choice of studies which will 
inevitably result in a corresponding dissipation of energy. 
No compulsion is laid upon the student in the upper years 
of his college course to enter any particular field of study or 
to engage in any particular pursuit, but when according to 
his own free will he decides upon the definite line of special 
work he wishes to undertake we believe that he should give 
himself to some systematic effort within a group of cognate 
subjects. We require him, therefore, to give a substantial 
part of his time to the courses of the particular department 
which he selects. Two courses may be chosen in any other 
fields particularly appealing to his interests. Freedom is 
thus secured without the danger of a loss of power in fruitless 
and confused activities. 

While the student's work is centered in the region of his 
special interests, it must be taken up in a broad-minded 
spirit which transcends the utilitarian demands of any 
particular profession or technical pursuit. The university 
is not specifically designed for the purpose of fitting a man 
directly for the daily duties of his future work in life. It 
should not attempt to develop a particular talent for a 
particular task, but the whole man. No faculty of the 
mind can be satisfactorily trained in isolation. There must 
be a symmetrical growth of all faculties. The high potential 
of stored energy, moreover, acquired in the process of a fully 
rounded development of all a man's powers lends an increased 



John Grier Hibben 137 

momentum and driving force to the particular activities of 
his specialty and thus allows many lines of capability to 
meet in one point of practical efficiency. Methods of in- 
struction should not narrow down to an anticipation of the 
customary procedure of the office and counting-room. The 
undergraduate education should not attempt to train special- 
ists nor to drill the students in any definite routine or rules 
of practice. It is not rules of practice, but the fundamental 
principles and governing laws of a subject which are of 
supreme value to one who would win his way to the heart 
of knowledge. Fit a man for the day's work, but at the 
same time equip him to meet the crisis and the emergency 
which the day's work will inevitably bring forth. He who 
has laid a broad and secure foundation will have no difficulty 
in erecting the superstructure. Whatever he builds, he 
will be able to build himself into the work of his hand and 
brain. Make a man and he will find his work. 

At this stage of the developing mind every effort should 
be put forth to secure originality of thought. By originality 
of thought I do not mean an original contribution to the 
world of knowledge necessarily, but an individual appropria- 
tion of the truth which by such a process becomes peculiarly 
one's own — the independent ability to think oneself into 
and through a subject, to be the master of one's knowledge 
and not its slave, and to acquire a critical sense of apprecia- 
tion that will nicely discriminate, in the face of the crucial 
situations and the significant problems of life, between the 
things essential and the things unessential, betv/een that 
which has value and that which has no value. We should 
not require of our students mere acquisition, but a high order 
of reflective thinking which manifests itself in methodical 
habits of clear and efficient thinking, in breadth of vision, 



138 The Philosophy of Education 

in an intellectual curiosity, in a tolerant spirit and an open 
mind. Let us not standardize either the teacher or the 
student, but allow the full play of fresh original impulse. 

Among all of the forces which tend to develop the strength 
of personaHty one of the most efficient in our experience at 
Princeton has been the preceptorial method of instruction. 
This rests upon the principle that nothing develops per- 
sonality so fully and so satisfactorily as personaHty itself. 
To bring the inquiring mind into daily contact with the 
knowledge, the art, and the enthusiasm of one who is skilled 
in his own special field of attainment — this is the supreme 
end of education. The most satisfactory results are gained 
when instruction becomes individual. It is only by indi- 
vidual care and guidance that the man of one talent can be 
developed as well as the man of ten talents. The university 
has also a responsibility in ministering to the needs of the 
average man and enabhng him to raise his factor of efficiency 
to its highest power. To discover native ability, to guide it 
into proper channels, to quicken ambition, to fire the imagina- 
tion, to watch and attend at the birth of a soul — that is the 
highest privilege and most solemn function of the teacher. 

The results which by the four years of training we hope 
and expect to produce may be characterized in a single sen- 
tence: It is a transformation of the school-boy into a man 
of the world — a man who can move freely and f amiharly 
in the midst of the world^s varied activities, who speaks its 
language, who is conversant with its manners, and who can 
interpret its thought. Do not misunderstand this meaning, 
however; it must be the world conceived in no narrow and 
limited sense of the term. The true man of the world is not 
confined to the knowledge merely of his own day and genera- 
tion. He must know the world of the past as well as the 



John Grier Hibben 139 

world of the present. For if he knows the past he is more 
capable of serving the present. He must be free from 
provincialism not only as regards space, but also as regards 
time. His knowledge also should not be restricted to any 
particular class of pursuits or of interests, but should com- 
prehend a cross-section of all social strata and embrace in 
intelligent and sympathetic regard the man whose life is a 
fight for bare existence as well as the one whom he may seek 
as a companion and a friend. The more profound and 
widely extended his knowledge of the world the more power- 
fully will he dominate it. Let the college man be a man of 
the world, but let his world be the world of all time, of all 
lands, and of all sorts and conditions of men. 

After the four years of the strictly college course have 
been completed there should be satisfactory facilities offered 
in a university for the varied pursuits of advanced students, 
where all of the powers broadly and profoundly developing 
during the preparatory years may be concentrated upon 
some subject which is to become the absorbing work of life. 
This is the region where many lines of effort converge in one 
focal point of heat and light; where special scholars may be 
trained; where the spirit of productive labor may be fostered; 
where they who learn may become in turn teachers and 
masters in the school of thought; where the once faltering 
mind may finally speak in tones of authority in the great 
world of knowledge. The buildings of our new Graduate 
College, now in process of construction, form a home where 
our special scholars, through daily intercourse one with 
another, may broaden their friendships and interests and at 
the same time find themselves stimulated in their zeal for 
the particular subjects which they are pursuing. There the 
communal life of those who have consecrated themselves to 



I40 The Philosophy of Education 

the sovereign decrees of truth should illustrate the devotion, 
the self-sacrifice, the austerity, and the enthusiasm of scholar- 
ship. 

We hear much today of vocational studies. Princeton 
has ever recognized the value of vocational study, but we 
would reserve the privilege of interpreting the word voca- 
tional in its highest and most significant sense. We would 
give no meager nor secondary significance to this word. 
The truly vocational study, it would seem, is that which 
fits one to respond intelligently and with free conviction to 
the vocation of man — that high calling which is the summons 
to no particular pursuit nor profession, but which is a world- 
wide and common call to every man to take his place, to do 
his w^ork, and to play his part in the community of his 
fellows. Whatever may be our special field of work, as men 
we are to live our lives within the great social organism of 
humanity. As Kant has splendidly put it, ''Man's greatest 
concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the 
universe and correctly understand what he must be in order 
to be a man.'' The years of intellectual discipline should 
create in every one who is a sincere seeker after the truth 
a profound sense of human obligation, of an obligation w^hich 
is the natural complement of the privileges which he has 
enjoyed. While our teaching must develop power, it must 
also develop a sense of responsibility for the use of that power; 
that sense of responsibility which makes the scholar pecul- 
iarly responsive to the claims of his less highly favored 
fellows. If there is an especially favored class in the world, 
it is the group of men who have profited by the privileges 
of an education. It is their duty to prove themselves worthy 
of recognition as an aristocracy — as an aristocracy, however, 
in the original meaning of that word. And their rule and 



John Grier Hibben 141 

influence in the community in which they Kve will show 
itself to be the best so far as it is determined by a wise pur- 
pose to devote the power of knowledge to the betterment of 
human conditions and to the satisfaction of human needs. 
It is in no sense a survival of the fittest if he who survives 
is content to survive alone. Our universities must teach to 
their students in season and out of season this lesson of hfe: 
With all their getting let them get understanding — that 
understanding of their station and their duties which will 
reveal to them this supreme law of privilege, that he who 
commands the sources of light must become a bearer of light 
to others. The perplexing political questions of the day 
arise largely out of strained and perverted social relations of 
man to man. If our social relations are to be satisfactorily 
adjusted, the privileged classes must give to their less favor- 
ably conditioned fellows some wise thought, some measure 
of sacrifice, some active sympathy and consideration, and 
thereby make success tributary to service. They who are 
coming more and more to be regarded as the natural leaders 
in this cause of humanity and they who are under com- 
pulsion to lead by example as well as by precept and 
suggestion are that very class of men who have come into 
possession of the highest of all privileges — the trained 
mind and the human heart. 

The first President of our country and the first American 
received in Nassau Hall the grateful acknowledgments by 
Continental Congress for his service in establishing the 
freedom and independence of the United States. For a 
part of the year 1783, from June to November, Nassau Hall 
was the Capitol of the young Repubhc, and here Adams, 
Jefferson, Madison, and their distinguished colleagues sat 
in counsel. The love of country has been a central lesson 



142 The Philosophy of Education 

in the teachings of our university. Naturally we cannot 
expect our students generally to attain to the high offices of 
public trust in our country, but we do expect every man 
who bears the Princeton mark and who is true to the Prince- 
ton traditions to serve his day and generation wdth fidelity 
and to bear upon his soul the burden of humanity. 

This institution was not founded in the spirit of civil 
liberty alone, but in the spirit of religious liberty as well; 
in that Christian faith and hope which is our most treasured 
tradition. Our fathers learned the lesson of the Great 
Teacher that the law of life is a law of liberty — a liberty 
which finds expression, however, in a law of service and a 
law of sacrifice. Our hope and our prayer is that their sons 
who bear their names and who are of their breed and blood 
may keep faith with the past while moving forward to possess 
the new lands of promise and of plenty. 



NEW WINE AND OLD BOTTLES ^ 

By WILBUR W. THOBURN 

What is our greatest danger? Perhaps it is the danger 
of failing to live true. I do not mean hypocrisy — that is 
acting a lie — but the failure to put into action what we are. 

Here is a common saying, ^'This is my ideal; I confess I 
do not live up to it.'' And this often means, ^'I do not try." 
If I were talking to students of zoology I would say that the 
presence of any power or organ means that it is being used; 
its disappearance means that it is being neglected. All the 
symmetrical forms and all the grotesque and one-sided forms 
are the products of this law. And we are under this law. 
Its action is rapid in the immaterial world. The removal 
of undesirable things, and the making permanent of good 
things, are never to be regretted; but by failing to live our 
ideals we lose the best part of ourselves. 

We hear much in this place about the dangers that threaten 
the young in the university. Parents and friends anxiously 
watch the changes that come, and fear the end. College 
life means metamorphosis, and each stage is fraught with 
danger. Those who anxiously watch the process wonder 
how it is possible to get an image of a man from the grotesque 
forms that sometimes masquerade as youth. Of course, 
the man comes, in most cases. College life is not a failure, 

^Originally delivered to the students of Leland Stanford Junior University, 
and reproduced here by special permission of Mrs. Harriet W. Thoburn. 



144 A^^^' Wine and Old Bottles 

though it is far from the success it might be. The intellectual 
and spiritual birth-rate exceeds the death-rate. Few fail 
utterly; few succeed in any great degree; but the balance 
is on the side of success. 

When a young man enters college most of his standards 
are external. Few of those who come here have lived long 
enough to accumulate much experience. The training of 
early years gives a trend w^hich none of us are strong enough 
to overcome completely, even when we recognize its de- 
sirabiHty. Our opinions, our beliefs, our bias in social and 
political and intellectual questions, are derived from our 
parents far more completely than our forms and features. 
It is perhaps the knowledge of this fact that adds to the 
solicitude of parents when they send their children away from 
home. They know what the student does not find out until 
later — that this training has never been tested by the one 
whom it most concerns, that the standards are external, 
and that opinions are not yet convictions. 

Now, it is here, during this period of intellectual living, 
that the change comes in our attitude toward our standards 
of living. Heretofore we have lived as others directed or 
influenced. We are here to acquire the power of directing 
ourselves. Impulse and feeling and emotion must here 
acquire some rational basis. Up to this time they have 
been the spontaneous fruits of our living. Heretofore we 
have acted because we felt like it; now we must know w^hy 
we act. 

This analytical process destroys much of our power of 
doing. By the time we have studied our steam to find what 
it is, it has become cold water. By the time we have thought 
much about the emotional and impulsive religious life which 
we have led, the emotion is all gone, or it may be that it is 



Wilbur W, Thoburn 145 

displaced by another. Cold water that has once been steam 
is insipid and somewhat disgusting. And so a religious Hie 
that has cooled down from emotionalism into rationalism 
often gives its owner a feeling akin to nausea. Some of 
the hardest words I have ever heard spoken against religion 
have come from those who at one time were enthusiastically 
religious. Some new wine has been poured into old bottles 
and turned sour. 

Our beliefs grow up with us. They are not entirely, not 
even largely, a matter of the intellect. They are part of 
our breeding and of our living. Many of our reasons for 
things are inherited from our parents. We do not always 
understand how they are constructed. Like a child who has 
received a watch, we play with it and break it, but cannot 
mend it. Many people think children ought not to play 
with watches. They are for older people. In the same way 
many people think that children should not play with reason, 
or meddle with the carefully constructed thought-systems of 
their fathers. They want them to take these systems, use 
them, call them their own, but dread the analyzing spirit 
that may try to find how the thing is made, and so spoil it. 

Many fathers and mothers say to me, ''If my boy will 
only hold on to the fundamentals.^^ They are afraid that 
the business of the university is to overthrow fundamentals. 
As if fundamentals could be overthrown! What they mean 
by fundamentals is their own conception of the truth, the 
basis of their own belief. They want their boys to wear 
their clothes — not the same style only, but the identical 
clothes — with all the creases and wrinkles and patches in 
place. Now, the wrinkles and creases represent experience 
and testing, and the patches are the scars — honorable 
scars of victory. And I have no patience with the sopho- 



146 New Wine and Old Bottles 

moric spirit which vaunts its reason and throws into the 
rag-bag everything that the fathers beheved. We would 
not be here today if our fathers had not beheved very close 
to the truth. However far afield we may go in our young 
and callow days, the larger part of us will be found revamp- 
ing the old beliefs of our fathers and mothers when we go to 
work in the world. I have taught long enough to know 
that this is true. But the time comes when the child be- 
comes the man, when he must know how his watch is made, 
even if it costs him several watches. The time comes when 
he finds himself asking, ^^Why do I believe this? Why do 
I practice this?" And because he cannot at once find a 
reason that will satisfy, many of the things he has believed 
all his life in common with his father will be laid on the shelf 
until the experiences of life lay a foundation for them again. 
Then they will be taken down. He will cease to do many of 
the things he has customarily done, because he finds that 
they are not the natural fruit of his life. It seems like 
hypocrisy to do them, even for the sake of father and mother. 
I have letters and figures from some hundreds of students 
that show me that eighty-five per cent of them take up 
their old practices again when their real li\dng seeks expres- 
sion. But there is nothing unnatural or very alarming to 
me in the suspension of religious activity, which is common 
among young men and women at the university. It is one 
of the penalties we pay for our isolation. Student life is not 
real life. It is a dangerous period; — all climacteric periods 
are dangerous. But they seem to be part of the plan of 
God's world. This suspension is only temporary. It is 
largely due to the confusion of change and readjustment; 
to the transfer of allegiance from authority to self. The 
change rarely comes without confusion, but it must come, 



Wilbur W, Thoburn 147 

and when it is complete it is worth all it costs. A Uttle bit 
of real living will bring back the enthusiasm and emotion, 
and no one can be faithful and true to his ideals without 
finding God displacing them with himself. Much as I sym- 
pathize, therefore, with the more or less painful processes of 
change, I do not regard the change itself as the greatest 
danger that threatens the young man or woman here. It 
must come, and this is the natural time for it to come. 

To the one who looks in vain among his books and notes 
for the old standards by which he shaped his life, I would 
say, ^^They are not there. You are here to study tools and 
methods, and this study fills a large part of your life. But 
the study of tools and methods and the filing of your wits 
will neither give you the glow of exercise nor the emotions of 
living; nor will study about God ever give you the confi- 
dence that working with Him gives." As students our posi- 
tion is abnormal. We get more than wx give. When you 
resume your place in the world, life will bring back the 
emotion you think you have lost, and clear up all the doubts 
that now seem so great. We all face the danger of mistak- 
ing the form in which the truth was clothed for the truth 
itself. 

Calvinism and Arminianism are trifling matters compared 
with the fact that God is and that we may call him our 
Father. Unitarianism and Trinitarianism are mere w^ord- 
quibbles compared wdth the fact that the spirit of Christ is 
in the world, sa\dng it. These things are not fundamentals. 
They are w^hat many mean by essential and fundamental, 
but they are only terms, forged by human intellects to express 
one phase of the truth as it appeared to them. There will 
be some astonished people who reach heaven and find that 
Christ was neither Methodist nor Presbyterian, Calvinist 



148 New Wine and Old Bottles 

nor Arminian — that He cared for none of these things 
except as they hampered and hindered those who beHeved 
them instead of beHeving Him, who worshiped them instead 
of using them to serve Him. 

Many of you are now in a period of change. Well that it 
should come during the isolation of your college days. You 
will never have so niuch time to settle things as now; yet 
you will find that you can settle very few. Have confidence 
in yourself. Trust your nerves to tell the truth, unless you 
have been abusing them. Some state this another way, 
and say, ^^ Trust in God.'' I mean the same thing. Be 
sure that you believe, and do not hold a mere opinion. To 
define is not belief; experience gives belief. 

God and righteousness and Christ, miracles and immor- 
tality, fatherhood and brotherhood, sin and redemption, 
these are not theological words though many theologies 
have been written about them. All are facts of experience, 
and as facts they all touch our lives in some way. Our 
touch with them is our knowledge of them. But do you 
not see it? We cannot talk about them and compare notes 
about them without changing our ideas of them and modify- 
ing our definitions. 

Many think it impossible to separate these things from the 
philosophy about them, wicked to try. We must try. We 
will ask Christ and history and literature and life what they 
say about these great facts. When we get their answers, 
for they all speak of them, we w^ill probably construct another 
philosophy in place of the old. It will seem better to us 
than the old, though perhaps not very different, because it 
expresses things that we believe, not what we have been 
told to believe. 



Wilbur W, Thoburn 149 

Believe in yourself. If a statement or a fact appeals to 
you as true, believe it. Be your own authority. Bottle 
your own wine. Friends will stand around with old bottles 
and beg you to put your new wine in them. They are wrong 
in asking, and you are wrong to try. Your new wine needs 
aging. It must be worked over and must swell up and settle 
down and be tested to see if it is worth anything before it 
can be put into anything but a new elastic bottle. Bottle it 
for yourself. It is the best wine in the world for you. Per- 
haps when it has aged it will be just like that in the old 
bottles, but you must cling to it as it is. It is yours. 

So I ask you not to be afraid of the fruit of your own 
thoughts. We here study together these great truths of life 
— God and Christ and man, sin and life and death and im- 
mortality. It is far more important that you should be 
sincere with yourself than that you should believe something 
that somebody has told you. 

There is no final test of truth but this one — its appeal to 
our lives. Coleridge says somewhere that the preeminence 
of the Bible lies in the fact that it finds us. By this test 
judge all truth — does it find you? Do not wait to reason 
it out. The fundamentals, the real fundamentals — the 
basis of all belief — cannot be reasoned out. 

The fatherhood of God, the divinity of man, the reality of 
righteousness, the spiritual life, immortality, the ideality of 
Christ — these are some of the fundamentals. We appre- 
hend them. Just as we get up in the morning and throw 
open the blinds and know that the sun is there, so these 
great facts appeal to us when we squarely face them. But 
the greatest danger that may threaten a young man or 
woman is the failure to put into action the truth that he 
does believe. 



150 New Wine and Old Bottles 

I sat by the side-lines the other evening when the ball 
was driven almost to my feet, and those twenty- two demons 
whose breathing nearly burst their canvas sides stood puffing 
a moment before they sprang at each other's throats. I 
almost stampeded; I did long to be one of them again. 
But I only sat and shivered there on the bleachers with 
another football philosopher, and we told each other how to 
play the game. 

A- young man said to me the other day, '^I have not been 
in church for three years." I looked him over as a curiosity 
and asked him why. His reply was, "The glaring incon- 
sistencies of church members made me sick. I could not 
stand it and just stayed away." How consistent! Here was 
such a good church member that he never went to church. 
A man who imagined he had an ideal standing wdth his 
back to it. Ideals are to run races with. The moment we 
stop chasing them they sit down — become opinions. 

If the old channel through which your best life flowed is 
filled up, find another one. If you cannot pour your new 
wine into old bottles, find new ones. Bottle it or lose it. 
If you cannot serve God and man through the church of 
Christian Endeavor because the inconsistencies there glare 
at you, let the truth glare somewhere that men, seeing how 
consistent a man can be, may be led to think how true God 
is. If you have new hght on old questions, let that light 
shine. If you put it under a bushel it wdll go out. "If 
therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is 
that darkness." 

The time comes more than once in a m.an's life when he 
must know what he believes, when the truth that is in his 
own heart is all that he can find. But no truth is ours until 
we first live it, until it enters into our lives and we become it. 



THE DESCRIPTION OF A GENTLEMAN ^ 

By JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 

Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentleman 
to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description 
is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly 
occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the 
free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he 
concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative 
himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what 
are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a 
personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do 
their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature 
provides both means of rest and animal heat without them. 
The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever 
may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he 
is cast — all clashing of opinion, or colhsion of feeling, all 
restraint or suspicion, or gloom or resentment; his great 
concern being to make every one at their ease and at home. 
He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards 
the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards 
the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he 
guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may 
irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never 
wearisome. He makes light of favors while he does them, 

^ Reprinted from The Idea of a University by special permission of Long- 
mans, Green and Company. 



152 The Description of a Gentleman 

and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never 
speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends 
himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, 
is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere 
w^th him, and interprets everything for the best. He is 
never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair ad- 
vantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for 
arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. 
From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of 
the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves 
towards our enemy as if he were one day to become our 
friend. He has too much good sense to be affronted at 
insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and 
too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and 
resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, 
because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irrep- 
arable, and to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages 
in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves 
him from the blundering discourtesy of better, perhaps, but 
less educated minds; who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack 
instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, 
waste their strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary, 
and leave the question more involved than they find it. 
He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear- 
headed to be unjust; he is as simple as he is forcible, and 
brief as he is decisive. Nowhere shall we find greater candor, 
consideration, indulgence; he throws himself into the minds 
of his opponents, he accounts for their mistakes. He knows 
the weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its 
province, and its limits. If he be an unbeliever, he will be 
too profound and large-minded to ridicule rehgion or to act 
against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in his 



John Henry Newman 153 

infidelity. He respects piety and devotion; he even sup- 
ports institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which 
he does not assent; he honors the ministers of religion, and 
it contents him to decline its mysteries without assaihng or 
denouncing them. He is a friend of religious toleration, 
and that, not only because his philosophy has taught him to 
look on all forms of faith with an impartial eye, but also 
from the gentleness and effeminacy of feeling, which is the 
attendant on civilization. 

Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, 
even when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is 
one of imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of 
those ideas of the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without 
which there can be no large philosophy. Sometimes he 
acknowledges the being of God, sometimes he invests an 
unknown principle or quality with the attributes of perfec- 
tion. And this deduction of his reason, or creation of his 
fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent thoughts, 
and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a teaching, 
that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity itself. 
From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical powers, 
he is able to see what sentiments are consistent in those who 
hold any religious doctrine at all, and he appears to others to 
feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, which 
exist in his mind no otherwise than as a number of deductions. 



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